Interred in the Bone
by BerylCoronet
Summary: Post-Star Trek Into Darkness. Carol Marcus' personal investigation into the cover-up following the Vengeance's crash into San Francisco leads her back into difficult position of rescuing the man who killed her father, she has to deal with both the darkness at the heart of Starfleet and the unexpected light in the augment's heart.
1. Chapter 1

**Interred in the Bone**

Disclaimer: I do not own Star Trek.  
Rating: PG-13

Warnings: graphic violence and description of PTSD symptoms

Summary: In the aftermath of the events of _Into Darkness, _everything has returned to normal within Federation borders and the Enterprise departed on its historic five-year mission. All is well... or is it? Aboard the flagship, Carol Marcus is plagued by nightmares and unanswered questions. Has the darkness truly been expunged from the heart of Starfleet or has a cover-up taken place instead?

_The evil that men do lives after them;_

_The good is oft interred with their bones._

(William Shakespeare,_ Julius Caesar_)

_Her father's head is trapped in the madman's hands, while she watches helplessly from her prone position on the floor, her shattered femur barely registering in the face of her fear. The augment's face is not human anymore but has turned into a twisted mask of sheer rage. There is a crack. Loud and sickening on the deadly quiet bridge. Pain both physical and emotional raises within her, her stomach roils and she screams... ._

Carol snapped wide awake, a twinge of nausea still slicing through her. She thought she had screamed both in the past and in the present, but in her solitary dark quarters aboard the Enterprise, she could not be certain. Her leg pulsed with pain, as she tried to turn to her side. She took a deep breath and reminded herself that the ache was not real. Her leg was just fine, shattered bone knit together down to the last molecule. Not a single scar remained. But the healing was skin deep. Even after a year of counseling and on the brink of a new beginning as a second science officer aboard the USS Enterprise that had just embarked on her five-year mission, the nightmares persisted and often kept her from getting a decent night's sleep. At least, the flashbacks had subsided and on most days she managed to keep the hyper-vigilance to a bare minimum. On most days. On others she was still jumpy and wary of personal contact.

She had been cleared for space duty only provided that she continued to attend weekly therapy sessions with Doctor M'Benga, who had a second degree in psychiatry, aboard the Enterprise. Only McCoy as CMO and Kirk from his position as captain knew of her PTSD diagnostic in the aftermath of her witnessing her father's murder on the Vengeance. McCoy was bound by confidentiality to keep the secret and Kirk did a surprisingly good job of tiptoeing around the issue, while not treating her as a porcelain doll, as long as she performed well in her official capacity. If there was one commitment Jim Kirk did not shy from, it was the one to his ship and crew. He had already proved that by being willing to die for them. Twice, as a matter of fact.

Once it had nearly been at her father's hand. Her father whom she used to adore and whom she had built as this larger than life hero of the Federation. Her father who was a traitor to everything said Federation stood for, who had tried to kill a ship full of fellow Starfleet officers in cold blood and whom she had seen murdered in a most gruesome fashion. She curled up in a fetal position, gritting her teeth against the sob struggling to erupt from her chest. She wanted to mourn yet she didn't feel she had the right to, despite what M'Benga assured her each time she saw him.

She was the daughter of a murderer and a pariah. She wished she could hide away forever, shrinking from sight and begging every officer she walked past aboard the Enterprise for a forgiveness she wasn't entitled to. She should have spotted the change in her father or maybe suspected that he had been a rotten apple all along. But she had been blinded by her love for him and up until his distance and record-keeping irregularities had compounded to a point where she could no longer overlook them, she had failed to act.

Now people were dead, tens of them on the Enterprise, when the Vengeance had fired upon the flagship under the admiral's orders, forty-two in London, thousands in San Francisco, not to mention the fellow officers dead on the floor of the Daystrom Conference Room at Starfleet HQ, all victims of circumstances set in motion by her father, who had thought he could open Pandora's box and play with what was inside with no consequences. If only her father had not deluded himself into believing he could control a superhuman tyrant, who had once ruled a quarter of the Earth. If only that man had not escaped. If only she had done something sooner. If only she had looked into that London facility that did not belong, the first time she had noticed it on the specs of the new long-range torpedoes, instead of just writing it off as not important. If only... .

She felt wetness leaking down her cheeks and squeezed her eyes closed against the darkness of her room. Questions were all she had left. Questions, nightmares and the inability to say the name of her father's assassin. Above all, there was the blood: blood staining San Francisco and Starfleet as a whole. Blood she could not wash off her hands. Blood covering her father's disgraced, empty grave in his home town, as his remains had been destroyed by the Vengeance's crash. There had not been a funeral. A distant relative had arranged for the stone to be placed next to her grand-parents' graves. Her mother had refused to have anything to do with it.

There was no love lost between Carol's parents. Their divorce, which had happened as Carol had been a small child, had been unpleasant with the main cause being that her father dedicated more time and attention to a Starfleet her mother did not particularly like rather than to his family. So Carol avoided mentioning the admiral to her mother, whose resentment she could understand and perhaps even shared. She didn't know exactly how she felt about her father herself. She wanted to hate him but found that she could not. She wanted to grieve him but would not permit herself to. She was definitely angry with him. Furious even and overwhelmed by shame so much that she was drowning in it. Between respecting her mother's imposed silence and the embarrassment of bringing up her father to her friends in Starfleet, Carol only had therapists to talk to about what she been through and to those she could only reveal so much, if she wanted to appear stable enough to stay on active duty.

Some of her more formal questions were shared by the command team of the Enterprise, both the captain and Mr. Spock having requested an investigation into the activities of the secret branch of Starfleet her father had called Section 31, but Admiral Komack had claimed that the organization was just a pet project of the former Commander-in-Chief and had not survived the destruction of its quarters in London. Apparently, Admiral Marcus had also acted alone only with the help of private security and a few officers he had embroiled in the whole Section 31 business and who had all died in the London attack. No one wanted that to be true more than Carol. But still it was very suspicious how her father had managed to build a ship like the Vengeance right in the middle of the Sol system with such limited assistance, that the Earth's perimeter sensors had failed to pick up the battle between the Enterprise and the Vengeance that had taken place near Luna and above all, that Alexander Marcus had managed to cover up Khan's existence so well for a whole year.

There was nobody left to ask, though, the crew of the Vengeance lost in the crash in San Francisco and her father dead, while the Enterprise had been sent away for five years, as soon as her repairs and refit had been finished. As for the augment himself, Starfleet Command had resorted to the same decision the victors of the Eugenics Wars had made, when the man had slipped through their fingers and run off to space: denial. Their superiors had explained that it would be detrimental to public morale to reveal that seventy-three Napoleons and Alexanders having survived one of Earth's bloodiest centuries were still alive and well and one of them had been left to roam the galaxy only to be end up causing the death of several admirals and all three of the first terrorist attacks since the creation of the Federation. The guilty party had been put back in cryo-stasis without trial shortly after the blood transfusion that had ultimately saved Kirk's life.

Officially, the London and San Francisco tragedies had been blamed on the rogue Starfleet officer, John Harrison killed in self-defense by Commander Spock in the aftermath of the third act of terror as well as on her father's illegal actions. Public opinion could rest assured: the guilty had been punished and Earth's paradise was safe once more. A monument had been erected in the memory of those who had been lost and Captain Kirk invited to give the inaugural speech right before his ship embarked on her historical and unprecedented mission. All was well, wrapped in neat, little bow. With fathom pain pulsing through her leg, Carol desperately hoped that was true. After what her father had put her through, she doubted she could withstand a dent in her picture-perfect image of Starfleet, her dream of wonders and exploration spread through the stars. The dream she was sworn to protect. The dream she would die for and for which she had set aside her abhorrence of violence to study weaponry. She refused to remember that she had joined Starfleet inspired by her father's example.

All was well. All seemed well yet it felt so wrong. Something had been broken beyond repair, lost with her father aboard the Vengeance and erased by the impact with San Francisco Bay. Carol did not know whether it was her innocence, her idealism or her previously unshakable belief in the goodness and truth of everything Starfleet stood for. But it was there, deep within her, an indescribable hollowness punched in the foundation of her hopeful view of the universe. It was this very demoralization that she avoided in her conversations with M'Benga and all her other therapists, because if they realized she no longer trusted Starfleet unflinchingly, she would lose her new-found family on the Enterprise.

Though exhausted, she gave up on sleep and limped off her bed, ordering the lights on as she moved. Her leg was still throbbing, but she ignored it, aware that it would go away soon. It always did. Something sparked alive in her memory. A dark silhouette sitting on the captain's chair on the Vengeance, his parting words ominous as the transporter had whisked her away.

_No ship should go down without her captain... ._

She had had other more pressing matters on her mind at the time, but now, as the words haunted her dreams, she realized they were vaguely familiar. She rubbed on her leg as she carefully advanced towards the computer monitor on her desk, ordering it to identify the origins of that sentence. It was a quote from the novel _Moby Dick_. She wriggled her toes on the cold floor. Her leg was starting to feel better and she had available a sleeping aid prescribed by her doctor. If she went to bed now, she had a chance of getting some rest before her shift began.

She contemplated the wisdom of what she was doing, even as she was reaching for her tablet, which contained a wide array of both alien and human literary works. _Moby Dick_ had to be among them. Try as she might, she could not reconcile the man who had crushed her father's skull between his hands with something so peaceful and normal as reading a 19th-century American classic. Her fingers sped across the pad, however she didn't search through the archives dedicated to literature but historical material on the rise of the augments and the Eugenics Wars. Maybe if she could let herself think the name of the man who had killed her father and wrought so much destruction, she could also come to some sort of peace with her parent's own transgressions.

When she returned to bed, it was with a monograph on the twentieth century genetic engineering projects opened on her tablet. If she were to read on this, she might as well start at the very beginning.

TBC


	2. Chapter 2

_He was awake. He knew that much. He could not move, though, captive in his own body. He could not even open his eyes, the darkness a constant companion. Darkness and pain. His whole body felt like a raw, pulsing nerve, splintered open, prodded and probed. The silences surrounding him was broken every now and then by hushed whispered of medical talk in English. The voices were discussing him. Experiments were being conducted on him. It should be familiar, but he couldn't be sure. Being a test subject hit too close to home. _

_He had no idea where he was or even when. Time twisted hazily somewhere beneath his reach. For a while he had believed himself to be still a child, still in the lab that had created him, a piece of property to be refined into the perfect soldier or the perfect carrier for a deadly biological weapon, depending on the proficiency of his immune system. There was something in his blood. Something he could not recall. Enhanced regenerating abilities that were no accident but had been built in slowly, tortuously, by infusion of lethal diseases to which his organism had steadily developed __antibodies._

_His family had been similarly modified. He remembered that. The shock of an explosion rocking a giant ship permeated his consciousness a while later. His family was gone, burnt to death in their sleep, the notion that at least they had not suffered too small of a consolation. He screamed but his mouth wouldn't open. No sound came out. Locked within himself he yelled his grief with no one to hear. _

# # #

Carol had been taught a general course of Earth's history in school, but beyond that, she had never been interested in learning more. Though she had not followed in her mother's footsteps as a molecular biologist, she had shared her love of exact sciences and disinterest in humanities. Hence, she was amazed at the lack of substantial data on the age of the augments. Few documents had survived the devastation of the Eugenic Wars and the subsequent fury of the human victors. Historians still struggled to make sense of remaining sources and sort through waters made even murkier by the enduring stigma against genetic engineering.

What she unearthed on the man who had killed her father, however, did not support Spock's claim of him being a homicidal maniac. The augment was a fairly well-known subject matter in certain academical circles but virtually unknown to the general public keen on forgetting that bloody era of mankind's past. Carol herself struggled with her understanding of it. It was difficult to imagine a human race restricted to the surface of its own planet and ravaged by wars, hunger, inequity and horrible diseases against which a primitive medicine was mostly useless. It didn't surprise her that the scientists of the time had grown so desperate they had resorted to altering the genetic foundation of humanity in hopes of improving their world.

She spent almost all her free time immersed in her research project, devouring book after book, starved for any additional insight. But at the end of the day, the truth was that they lacked sufficient information on the period. In fact, she thought she began to understand why her father had underestimated the augment to such an extent. History all but remembered him fondly: his empire had been the largest and albeit short-lived, the most peaceful. He had acquired it through brutal means, but once in power he had not committed any atrocities or ordered ethnic cleansing like others of his kind. In fact, despite abolishing most civil liberties and seeming set on imposing his own brand of order on his state, he had taken several, most efficient economic measures, supported culture and sought to minimize poverty and social discrepancies. He had had only a mild personality cult and even that had been mostly instigated by people who had tried to suck up to him. As far as historians could tell, he had attempt to instate some sort of authoritarian noocracy with him and his people at the top.

He had not started any wars himself and even sought to avoid them by using shrewd and calculated diplomacy. But it had been a turbulent time and the other augments began fighting with each other, while the humans rebelled, and ultimately he had been attacked as well. The accusations of war crimes and genocide had started with the show trial following his ultimate defeat, but by then he had already disappeared. Experts believed the flight of the Botany Bay to be a myth, a romantic rumor in the vein of the Arthurian legend that his scattered human supporters had spread. Apparently, he had been missed: not all of his monuments had been destroyed and they had been regularly covered in flowers, until the Third World War obliterated all trace of his reign and the dust had finally settled on his epoch.

The thought of him as some sort of once and future king was cringe-worthy, but seemingly he retained his share of passionate defenders. Carol came across a PhD thesis of a young Harvard researcher named Marla McGivers, who had authored a controversial biography, in which he described him as an enlightened leader, tactical genius and open-minded man, who had not necessarily despised humanity or otherwise he would not have gone to great lengths to protect its cultural treasures. Carol wondered how the historian had reached such a conclusion from the scant data available so she sent McGivers a private message inquiring for details.

To Carol's dismay, McGivers replied with a peeved communique stating that she had been contacted with similar questions by the esteemed Dr. Phlox of all Denobulans two years ago and that the alien had claimed he had needed the information for an interspecies conference on the history of genetic manipulation. Since the conference had never come to pass, the historian was understandably annoyed and less than interested in helping out a Starfleet officer. Alarms went off in Carol's head. McGivers had no reason to lie and unlike the leaders of the Eugenic Wars, Phlox and his fellow crew-mates aboard the Enterprise NX-01 were household names and mandatory reading at the Academy.

Back when Carol had been a science officer with Starfleet HQ and had had unlimited access to her father's special projects, Dr. Phlox, enjoying the long lifespan of a Denobulan, had been chief of staff at a top-secret facility designated Cold Station 12. Beyond that, she had never met Phlox herself, nor had she received more detailed intelligence on the mysterious space station. This latest tidbit, however, did propel to the forefront of her mind a lot of questions she had previously feared looking into. The suspicion that a cover-up had followed the crash of the Vengeance into San Francisco Bay solidified into a certainty Carol was wary of accepting, because if she did, it meant that the cancer of corruption persisted at the heart of Starfleet and that a tragedy that had killed thousands could be repeated at any given time.

She knew she should go to her commanding officers with her doubts, but her investigation into the potential wrongdoing of one Starfleet admiral had brought disaster onto the Enterprise once; she could not do this to these people again. Besides, it wasn't this ship's job to right everything that was wrong within Starfleet. They had JAG and internal inquiries committees for that. It was bad enough that her colleagues on the Enterprise had to live with her as a daily reminder of their captain humiliating himself and begging for all their lives only to be callously dismissed so that the Vengeance could train phaserbanks on them once more. Not all her nightmares were of her father's death; some of them included the Enterprise blowing up into tiny flaming pieces, the sins of her father washed into even more blood.

But was the entire conspiracy surrounding Khan's awakening and the building of the Vengeance solely her father's sin or had there been something larger at play? Something worse perhaps? Her conscience gnawed at her during restless nights, reminder her that it had been her failure to act that had let her father get away with illegal deeds done in the name of Starfleet for over a year. Back then she had not noted any change in his behavior, until it had been too late. Fatally so. But now she knew something was up. She had to act, but whatever she did, she could not drag anyone else in the consequences of it.

Besides, her heart ached at the thought of delivering a fresh blow to Jim Kirk's restored faith in Starfleet, his hopeful words at the dedication of the San Francisco memorial ringing in her ears each time she considered her options. Kirk was much more idealistic than he seemed and selfless to a fault. He had proved it tenfold through his willingness to die for his crew. Carol would not soon forget glimpsing his still body in sickbay or McCoy's crestfallen look. There were other images haunting her as well: Jim comforting her after they had been beamed back to the Enterprise from the Vengeance, then supporting her to medbay and Nyota's concern upon seeing her injured. These were good people, loyal colleagues and future friends. They deserved to make history with their five-year mission; they did not deserve to fall victim to more friendly fire.

In the aftermath of a distress call from Deep Space Station K-7, the decision was ripped from her hands.

# # #

_Laughter was an unusual sound in his residence during the last days of his reign, just like joy was a rare sight. The war was all but lost, an full-scale assault on his capital imminent, but when Joaquin and Ling had come to him and told him they wanted to wait for a better time to get married, he had counseled them otherwise. They might not win this fight, but he already had an escape plan in place. They would leave and go somewhere where no enemy would reach them, somewhere where they could start anew, just themselves, finally safe. _

_The memory dimmed and faded into the darkened pits of his consciousness. They were gone. Joaquin and Ling would never laugh again. He would never get to tell them that their exile was over and that their better future had arrived, because he had failed them, his promises now reduced to ashes. He had let his family die. _

TBC


	3. Chapter 3

A/N: reviews of any kind are always appreciated!

# # #

Carol was in no mood to go shopping, but Nyota had not played fair and enlisted Chekov's aid in convincing her. Carol would dare a Klingon at his or her most sullen to deny anything to the Enterprise's resident whiz kid. This was how she found herself wandering Deep Space Station K-7's despondently empty corridors, while the communications officer proudly took her bounty back to the ship. The tribbles were still a mystery to Federation scientists and the one that had contributed to saving Kirk's life had stayed behind at Starfleet HQ for further study. Carol suspected that Uhura had purchased one from the intergalactic trader, Cyrano Jones, as a reminder of the furry creature's unexpected help.

She was about to return to the ship herself, not interested in having a drink in the bar with Scotty, Chekov and some of the engineering crew, either. Besides, they might need her aboard, given that a Klingon cruiser had just showed up as well. Its captain claimed that all they wanted was shore-leave under the stipulations of the Organian treaty, but Carol remained skeptical. The Klingons had not traced the dead patrol in the Kheta province back to Starfleet, but from the way their hostility towards the Federation had escalated, it was safe to say they did suspect something. Where Klingons were concerned, one could not be too careful.

She was so adsorbed by her thoughts on possible all-out war with the Klingons, that she almost bumped into a hooded figure. She opened her mouth to apologize, when the stranger pushed her hood back and Carol found herself staring at a living legend.

"Doctor Phlox," she breathed.

The Denobulan gave her a warm smile. "Oh, Doctor Marcus. It is good to see you."

The recognition brought her no amount of pride, only bitterly reminded her that her father's disgrace had now made her infamous.

"I came here looking for you. Please," he said gesturing to an alcove a few paces away.

They sat on the thick window ledge, before her companion spoke again. "You have recently contacted Dr. McGivers at Harvard University on Earth."

Carol was taken aback. "How did you...?"

Phlox looked at her with a mixture of compassion and regret. "All communications off the Enterprise are being monitored. Before you ask, yes, even those on private frequencies. I do not expect this situation to last indefinitely, just until certain people are convinced you and your colleagues have put the San Francisco tragedy behind you."

"How do you know all this?" she asked with no small amount of horror.

He smiled again with the same candor from before. "I still have many friends at Starfleet Command … and, I am flattered to say, admires as well." He paused to look her straight in the eye. "Two years ago I was heading the research facility at Cold Station 12. You will note I am using the past tense, since I was immediately re-assigned to a less classified location near my home world, once I refused to assist your father with medical tests that were to be performed on a then recently-revived and highly controversial figure of your past."

Carol turned her head to look at the distant stars visible through the window they were sitting next to. "I'm sorry," she murmured.

"Nonsense, my dear. You had nothing to do with it."

Carol nodded, but she didn't turn to face him. "What kind of tests, Doctor?"

"Let's say that they were largely against both Denobulan and human medical ethics. I have kept many of Starfleet secrets throughout the time, one of which about an incident from the year 2154 involving the late Doctor Arik Soong and augment embryos. No, you wouldn't know anything about it; the respective record is on index and within good reason, in my opinion. But my involvement is why I believe Admiral Marcus tried recruit my help. Anyhow, this is not why I sought you out."

She looked at him again. "Why then, doctor?" she asked with some trepidation.

His eyes filled with compassion, as he answered in carefully controlled voice. "Starfleet Command is not the only place I have friends, my dear. Some are among my former colleagues at Cold Station 12 and I have received word from them that they now have a new patient, one not in cryo-hibernation, which is unusual for that place."

"May I ask what Cold Station 12 is exactly?"

"It is a medical research facility that stores some of the deadliest pathogens in the sector and up until the year 2154, a large number of augment embryos having survived the Eugenic Wars on Earth."

Sheer terror sliced through her. "Where are those embryos now?"

"They were destroyed in that incident I mentioned, but I assure you the Enterprise I served aboard was in no way to blame. In fact, if we could, we would have prevented it."

She took deep breath before her next words. "And you think they have an augment on the station now?"

He studied her from the corner of his eyes, an emotion she couldn't quite identify sparking in those alien orbs. "I have no means of knowing that for certain, but I do suspect it."

"Why are you telling me all this? Why not go public with it yourself?"

He sighed. "I am old, Doctor Marcus, even by my people's standards, eccentric again even by the same standards and have been involved in a fair share of unorthodox research that modern technology has often disproved. But such is the fate of those whose time has passed. Unfortunately, all this also makes me easy to discredit, especially since I have nothing except my word as evidence." He paused to regard her solemnly. "Do you know what Section 31 of Article 14 of the Starfleet Charter states?"

She tilted her head, doubts of all kind filtering into her mind. "Article 14 only has thirty sections," she replied automatically.

He leaned closer to her. "Section 31 of Article 14 of the Starfleet Charter allows for extreme and otherwise illegal measures to be taken in times of threat." He pulled back but kept his voice barely above a whisper. "And the Federation is currently under an escalating threat from the Klingon Empire."

Carol balled her hands into fists in her lap. "Are you telling me there is a conspiracy at the heart of Starfleet?"

"I am telling you that there is a clandestine organization that answers to no one hidden within the Federation's legal system and that this is how your father managed to build a war vessel in the Sol system seemingly without anyone knowing and also how he spirited away for a year a revived 20th century Earth dictator."

Something twisted low and painful in her stomach. He was right, when he had claimed nobody would believe him, should he go public. He did sound insane. But then a while ago she would have thought insane anyone who had said that her own father would betray his oath and use a monster from the past to build weapons, only to open fire on a ship full of innocent people to cover up his wrongdoing.

"Is there nothing you can give me, nothing at all?" she asked.

"I know you have questions, Lieutenant, or you wouldn't have attempted to talk to Doctor McGivers. So I came here to impart to you what answers I have, because I believe that you of all people deserve them. However, I must caution you to be careful, should you pursue this... and I think you would. Section 31 has survived for a long time and it would survive you, if need be."

There was a measure of paternal care in the way he looked at her and it chafed in more ways than Carol could count. Still she would not be deterred.

"Doctor Phlox, please," she begged. She had nothing to bargain, but she could plead and had no doubt this kind, noble man would acquiesce.

He held up a hand in appeasement. "As for what I can give you, I'm afraid it's nothing more than the coordinates and schematics of Cold Station 12."

"It would do," she replied.

# # #

It was not without self-loathing that Carol entered the captain's ready room. She didn't want to lie to Jim once more, but she refused to drag him again into something that could spiral out of control. This was her burden to bear and hers alone. The Enterprise was about to leave the orbit of K-7, after Kirk and McCoy had uncovered a Klingon agent infiltrated on the station with the unlikely help of tribbles. Those trilling little things were surprisingly useless at times. If only they weren't also an ecological menace.

Kirk lifted his eyes from his pad, as he saw her come in, and gave her a tired smile. "What can I do for you, Carol?"

"I heard congratulations were in order," she said with a slight grin.

His own smile widened a fraction. "Thank you." He gestured to the chair on the opposite his side of his desk.

"Sir, I know we haven't been away for long, but as you know, I canceled my shore leave on K-7 and since my mother is at a conference on Aldebaran, I was wondering if I could have a few days off to visit her?"

Kirk leaned back in his chair before nodding to her. "Of course, you can." His deep blue eyes were studying her more intently than it was comfortable, but she held herself stiff under his surprisingly insightful scrutiny. "Are you alright, Carol?"

For a brief second, she was tempted to tell him everything, but then the imagine of him dead in medbay flashed into her mind and she stopped herself. "Yes, Jim, I'm fine."

# # #

Doctor Phlox had given her more than just information; he had been more than willing to part with his ship for her: a small and fast cutting-edge Denobulan one that could be easily manned by one person. She docked within a safe distance from Cold Station 12, hiding her vessel behind a protuberance of the asteroid, on which the facility was located, then used a space suit to sneak inside. She had memorized the schematics provided by the Phlox and slipped in through the ventilation system. She did not go far. She was in the process of trying to get into a computer terminal to look for proof of the doctor's statements, when a familiar voice called from behind her.

"Doctor Marcus, we have been expecting you."

"Commodore Lance Cartwright," she muttered, recognizing the man who had worked closely with her father on several of the programs the admiral oversaw personally.

The officer was flanked by two guards, who had phasers trained on her. They were all wearing some sort of black leather uniform Carol was unfamiliar with. She reached for her own weapon, an unmarked disruptor she had acquired on her way there.

Cartwright shook his head 'no'. "That wouldn't be necessary, Doctor. We mean you no harm." He extended his hand. "Still I'd appreciate, if you could hand over your disruptor," he said pleasantly, his tone one of a request rather than order.

Either way, she had no choice. She was outnumbered. The best she could do was play along for now. "How did you know I was coming?" she asked as he gave him the weapon.

"We've been keeping an eye on the good doctor Phlox and his ship. Besides, unlike the always trusting Captain Kirk, we actually bothered to verify your mother's whereabouts."

She glared at him. "You took an oath, Commodore," she said, placing an additional emphasis on the rank.

Her jab seemed to have little impact on him. "And I'm honoring it," he replied calmly before gesturing to the corridor behind him. "I don't know what Phlox told you exactly, but we are not the villains here."

She fell in step by his side with the guards following closely behind. "Section 31 is against the spirit of everything the Federation stands for."

"But not against the letter," he corrected.

Carol said nothing. Starfleet had been built with a Trojan horse inside. That much she could not deny.

Cartwright lead her through a maze of corridors and even stairs. The station's design was positively antiquated, probably early 22nd century, but the technology adorning it was state-of-the-art. They arrived to a small office, in which he let her go in first then waved off the guards. It made a certain amount of sense, since without the element of surprise on her side, she would not make it far, if she attacked him.

"Have a seat," he said politely and strolled to a replicator on the wall behind the desk at the back of the room. "Can I get you something?"

She pulled the chair in front of the desk and sat down. "No, thank you" she said tightly.

He shrugged, ordered himself a coffee and moved to sit across from her. "I'm sure you have a lot of questions."

She arched a brow at him. "I'm not sure you're the person to answer them," she quipped.

He smiled fractionally. "Like I said, we're not the enemy. In fact, we exist solely to protect the Federation from its enemies and some things are better done under the cover of secrecy. You understand. After all, as far as your captain knows, you're spending shore leave with your mother on Aldebaran right now."

Carol felt her cheeks heat up and looked away. She had lied twice now to Jim Kirk, both times in a vital matter. Regardless of the difference in their motivations, Carol could see the analogy with Section 31 and it made her both uncomfortable and angry. "What do you want from me?" she spat.

"For you to consider an offer."

She frowned. "You want me to work for you... just like my father," she said in both disbelief and disdain.

"Your father was head of Starfleet. We worked under his command. And I want to ask you to work with us."

She looked him in the eye then, letting her anger permeate her gaze. "To do what? Exploit the tactical knowledge of 20th superhuman dictators to build weapons. No, thanks, I prefer the weaponry I come up with myself."

He sighed heavily. "We made a mistake by keeping that bastard on too long of a leash. That would not happen again."

She swallowed past the lump in her throat. "This is enslaving a sentient being you're talking about, augment or not."

His face hardened, his eyes growing cold. "He's a lab rat with fangs and claws who chewed his way out of the place where they made him. Then he went on to commit genocide and cause war in one century and crashed a ship into innocent civilians in another. Creatures like him are not sentient, they're mindlessly violent monsters. But you don't have believe me, you saw what he did with your own eyes. And if you need any more confirmation, I have Phlox's own report on what happened the last time someone thought his kind to be people."

Carol sustained his glare without flinching, refusing to take the bait. "Is that why you keep one around right now?"

"We don't just keep one around. We have Khan Noonien Singh himself in this facility."

The name was the equivalent of a punch to her sternum. The phantom pain in her leg flared to life instantly and she sucked in a breath, hissing at its potent sting. "He'll kill you all," she whispered, her heart leaping in her throat.

Cartwright seemed unaffected. "No, he won't. He's heavily sedated."

She scowled at him. Her leg was still throbbing, but she had managed to bring herself somewhat under control. "What do you need with him then?"

He got to his feet. "Come see for yourself."

TBC


	4. Chapter 4

A/N: reviews keep the muse happy! :)

# # #

Cartwright lead her to the lowest level of the labyrinthine spiral that was Cold Station 12. There at the end of yet another brightly lit, blue-gray corridor, armed security officers stood vigil by a containment cell two sizes smaller than the ones in the brig of Constitution class starships. The entrance was barred by a force field. The only furniture inside was a biobed with a connected holographic monitor displaying vital sings and other medical readings.

Carol walked faster, her heart picking up speed again. Her leg was still smarting, but it was nothing she could not manage. She only stopped when the forcefield kept her from entering the cell. The man on the bed lay absolutely still and did not seem cognizant. Either way, movement would have been impossible, as his wrists and calves were restrained by metal handcuffs. A band of translucent alloy had been placed over his neck as well. He looked pale, cheeks sunken, facial bones unnaturally prominent. The skin around his eyes was bruised and his lips were discolored to the point of being almost white.

She sucked in a deep, startled breath, when she noticed rapid ocular movement under the closed lids.

"He is in an induced coma, but his drugs have to be resupplied at regular intervals. For all their limited resources, 20th century geneticists sure knew what they were doing, when they made him," Cartwright voice floated to hers ear from somewhere behind her. "It's not easy even for our medication to keep him under."

She heard him, but the words registered only briefly, as she was unable to tear her gaze from the augment lying helpless and heavily sedated on the bed. There was nothing of the ruthless man, who had taken over the Vengeance with a few effortless blows before callously threatening the crew of the Enterprise with a slow death, left in the one before her eyes. His face was devoid of commandeering arrogance or of the furious cruelty of the moments before her father's skull had broken apart in his hands. When she had tried to reason with him, he hadn't even bothered to pay her any heed and stepped over her foot as though merely swatting away a mild nuisance, instead of crushing living flesh and bone. And then... then... .

Pain coiled low in her leg, traveling up to her thigh. She remembered the terror etched on her father face, as he had died, despair crushing her as she had been powerless to help him, her lungs seeming inflated beyond capacity as an involuntary scream had been ripped from her body. In that moment, Alexander Marcus had not been the admiral who had betrayed Starfleet and fired upon the flagship, but the man who had held her tiny hand in his large one, as she had taken her third steps, because he had missed the first two occasions, the man who had first told her of Zefram Cochrane's flight and the dream of the stars, who had gifted her a model of the first Enterprise when she had been ten, and had had tears in his eyes the day she had graduated from the Academy. And this... creature had taken him away from her in the most horrendous fashion.

Cartwright was right: there was something unlike anything she had seen in both human and aliens in the augment and she knew it better than anyone. She had glimpsed it, when the man on the other side of the force field had murdered her father: something so ferocious and so senseless, that the wildlife on the most inhospitable planets could not hope to match. There was no sign now of that viciousness on his ill-looking face; instead, it had been replaced visible distress. Perhaps he was in physical pain. On the footsteps of that realization, a new feeling rose in her, one she had never before experience to such a degree: satisfaction. Her heart stuttered in her chest, as she became aware that she was glad of her enemy's suffering, so much that it burnt, setting aflame a dark place within herself, one she discovered from the first time.

She swallowed against the bile pushing at her throat, as stark fear batted at the riveting triumph. A man was hurt, subjected to undoubtedly illegal medical tests, and instead of her conscience screaming at the injustice of it all, she was exuberant. For one terrifying second, she thought she had gone mad. She had no time to dwell on it, however, as a woman in hospital shrubs brushed past her without a word and keyed a code on a panel on the wall, dissolving the forcefield enough for her to take the tray of hypos she was carrying inside the cell.

Carol turned to Cartwright. His knowing look made her stomach roil with nausea. He had clearly noticed her reaction to the augment's condition. Carol let it pass. "What could possibly justify the risk of taking him out of cryosleep again?" she asked tersely.

"Doctor McCoy's report on the serum that revived Captain Kirk made for an interesting read. The extent of the regenerative abilities of Khan's platelets are an invaluable source of vaccines against some of the worst viral threats we've encountered." He took a step closer to her. "As I'm sure you know, space exploration didn't just take us into the path of hostile powers, but also into contact with diseases that could render entire races extinct. Remember that outbreak of neural parasites on the Deneva colony? It was your ship that answered the distress call, wasn't it?"

Carol shuddered. That had not been the kind of mission one forgot, especially since it had carried additional gravitas due to the fact that Jim Kirk's brother and his family were stationed on Deneva. The crisis had been averted, before it could properly begin. No soon had the Enterprise reached orbit, that Starfleet medical had sent over an antidote to the violent disease, saving the lives of everyone on the colony and allowing Jim and his brother an unexpected time together.

"You infected him with the parasites," she said, making it a statement rather than a question.

"It's all very humane," Cartwright assured. "The drugs made sure he wasn't aware of developing the symptoms. And all those people on Deneva and who knows how many others got to live to see another day. After everything he did, he owes us that much."

Carol gritted her teeth together, spying from the corner of her eye the woman leaving the augment's cell and typing in the code that put the forcefield back into effect. She thought of Phlox's words about ethics both human and alien and the inalienable rights inscribed in the Federation's founding documents. They all seemed so distant and artificial, words on pads and paper, nothing more. What had substance were the graves of those a homicidal tyrant had killed in two separate centuries, leaving a trail of blood whenever he went. It was only fair that he contributed to saving other lives in exchange, whether he liked it or not. After all, it was not so different from what she had helped McCoy do, when the doctor had taken blood from the unconscious augment in order to save Kirk.

She looked Cartwright in the eye. There was another question weighting heavily on her mind. "And if I refuse to cooperate, then what? Are you going to bury me somewhere on this asteroid as a small sacrifice to make for the safety of the Federation?"

The commodore straightened himself and shrugged unconcernedly. "Don't be melodramatic, Doctor Marcus. If you refuse us, we'll simply return you to your ship and let you go wherever you please. You could, of course, go public with what you know, but then we'll make sure documentation surfaces showing that Khan has not been removed from his cryotube in the facility housing the rest of his crew. Besides, without any evidence backing your claims and considering your psychiatric diagnostic, how much credibility can you expect to have?"

She glared at him. "Are you threatening me?"

He smiled slightly. "I'm merely stating the facts, should you decide to be a hero in a situation requiring none. I think we both know how easily your being cleared for duty can be reversed, your Starfleet commission suspended on grounds of mental instability, followed perhaps by recommendation of involuntary commitment." His tone was neutral, nothing menacing filtering through, and his whole demeanor remained amicable. He might as well have discussed the weather rather than the wrecking her career.

She pushed aside a fresh bout of anger. "I need to sleep on it."

He nodded, not looking at all surprised. "I think we can lend you quarters and a proper place to dock your ship. However, given the limited time we both have until you have to report back to the Enterprise, I'm sure you'll understand, when I say that I can't give you longer than 24 hours to make your decision."

# # #

The Cold Station 12 equivalent of living quarters included a tiny spartan bedroom with a claustrophobic en-suite bath. Cartwright had confined her to it but given her his word that she wasn't under armed guard or video surveillance. Once alone, Carol staggered into the fresher, the pain in her leg unbearable by this point. She dropped to her knees by the toilet and violently emptied the contents of her stomach. Her hands gripped the porcelain bowl with all the strength she could muster only to realize that there wasn't a muscle in her body that wasn't shaking.

Her mind was whirling in circles, always returning to that dark delight of seeing the miserable condition of her father's murderer. She had never in her life even entertained the possibility of rejoicing into someone's pain. That she was capable of it made her feel that she was somehow worse than him... than Khan. At least, he had the excuse of his augmented aggressiveness and lack of moral compass for what he had done. But she knew better. The Carol Marcus she thought she was did not condone torture and using someone as test subject for the galaxy's worst pathogens; she did everything in her power to stop it. She would not allow grief and loss to tarnish that crystalline column that was what she stood for and what was right.

As she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, steeling herself for the difficult journey of getting up on a leg in awful psychosomatic pain, she wondered if this had been how her father's degradation had started: one small allowance after another under the excuse of safeguarding their way of life, until it had all snowballed into justifying just about everything. Her knuckles turned chalky on the edge of the toilet, as she managed to drag herself upwards, careful not to rest her full weight on the leg that her treacherous mind considered still injured. The effort made her vision blurry for a few seconds, before she could properly stand. Her stomach cramped, her disgust at her almost giving into the temptation of Cartwright's poisonous promises mixing with her anger both at her failing body and at the man who had caused her such deep physical and metal wounds.

She almost toppled over, while straining herself towards the sink. She rinsed her mouth, the foul taste at the back of her throat stubbornly refusing to go away. She could swear she had fire ants devouring the flesh of her leg. "You're fine," she told her living reflexion in the bathroom mirror. The downside was that she was also alone with only her pain and determination for comfort. She decided it was all she needed.

She squeezed her eyes shut, digging into her mind for the relaxation exercises M'Benga had been teaching her. She would not give into the pain. She would not give into any thirst for revenge. She would not become Khan, Cartwright or her father. She could do this.

# # #

Carol keyed the frequency Cartwright had provided her with on the ancient communication panel on the wall of her would-be quarters on the station. "Commodore," she began, infusing her voice with a calm she did not truly feel. "I'll work with you... on one condition."

TBC


	5. Chapter 5

A/N: reviews keep the muse happy! :)

# # #

Cartwright leaned back in his chair staring at her in disbelief. "I beg you pardon?"

Carol slammed her hands down on his desk, meeting his gaze head on. "I think we both know, Commodore, why you're trying to recruit me. It isn't because of my parentage or my weapons expertise. You want eyes and ears on the Enterprise to make sure no one on the command team asks any questions you don't want to. So if you want me to spy on people who trust me for Section 31, here's my price: I want to look that son of a bitch in the eye and tell him he'll spend the rest of his sorry life trapped inside his body, while we bleed him dry of the last usable antibody in it."

The pain in her leg had dulled to a decreasing ache, and her high-running adrenaline counterbalanced that nicely. Ashamed as she was of it herself, she had to admit that her visible pleasure at Khan's suffering actually worked to her advantage, giving her a better chance of convincing Cartwright that she was being truthful.

The commodore studied her in silence, his eyes boring into her skull. Carol did not budge, biding her time until he inclined his head in acknowledgement. "One minute. Not a second longer."

"It'll do," she said coolly.

# # #

Carol kept her eyes on Khan's medical readings, watching as his vital signs slowly accelerated. On the other side of the biobed, the doctor nodded in her general direction. She forced herself to shift her gaze from the holographic monitor to the augment. She was alone with the medic in the cell, but Cartwright waited with the armed guards on the other side of the forcefield.

Khan's purplish eyelids trembled briefly, before they peeled off his orbs, which were clouded and unfocused. A muscle in her jaw ticked nervously. At least, her leg no longer hurt. She leaned closer to him, silencing the inner voice warning her that this was closer to treason than falsifying transfer orders on a name other than hers to sneak aboard the Enterprise to investigate the head of Starfleet.

"We don't have long so whatever you're already planning, don't," she snapped and before she could change her mind, she grabbed a tranquilizer hypo from the nearby tray and shoved it into the doctor's neck. With her free hand, she retrieved a single-use transporter from a concealed pocket of the Andorian jumpsuit she was wearing and slammed it onto Khan's chest. His eyes widened, an unnamed emotion swirling into the iridescent depths, and his mouth fell open, as he sucked in deep breath.

Cartwright yelled at her from the other side of the forcefield and she knew she had only seconds, before the guards lifted the forcefield and burst in. Fortunately, their own paranoia regarding Khan, justified as it was, worked in her favor. She had noted before that field could not be deactivated through voice command like on ship brigs, but through an extensive and presumably personalized security code, which gave her precious time to disable Khan's restraints. Normal biobeds had no such features, but while she had been working with her father at Starfleet HQ, a special prototype for extreme cases had been in the development and she had seen its specs.

As soon as the cuffs fell off the augment, she grabbed the doctor's communicator and hailed the frequency of her borrowed Denobulan ship's computer. "Two to beam up," she ordered the alien mainframe. The last thing she glimpsed before her surroundings changed was the forcefield dropping and the guards aiming phasers. But by then it was too late.

"Computer, retract all moors," she ordered, once on her ship. "Navigational systems online. Full power to warp engines."

She heard a body hit hard the floor behind her, as she pounced on the command console and set a course deeper into Federation territory at maximum speed. There was no doubt in her mind that Khan could not stand on his own with a potent cocktail of tranquilizers still running through his veins and weakened by the tests performed on him, but she couldn't be bothered with him until they weren't within a safe distance. She had observed an unmarked Antares-type ship and small freighter attached to the station, when she had come in, and though her own was light enough and enjoying the best of current Denobulan technology, the Antares vessel could still outrun it.

Charging into the thick of Federation star traffic had been a calculated risk. Given the fact that Section 31 was keen on keeping its secret, they could not enlist any other ships they might control in their pursuit, nor would they find it easy to invent a pretext to trick anyone else into firing upon an innocuous Denobulan vessel. Not if they wanted to keep their low profile intact, anyway. Still the Antares gained up on her enough to give her shields a run for their money, before she could shake them off among routes well-traveled and carrying an elevated risk of exposure. To her luck, her cargo was too valuable for Cartwright's operatives to blow her up. They also tried hailing her, no doubt to entice her to give up, but she ignored them.

Her destination was a dangerous one, but she needed someplace isolated where she could regroup and decide what to do next. She had followed an impulse rooted in the timid voice of her conscience she refused to let her resentment towards Khan drawn, but her next steps would have to be precisely calculated. As of now, her main concern was making it where Section 31 would not come after her and she focused on the task at hand, doing her best not to think of the man on the floor right behind her chair. Khan could attack her the second he succeeded in standing on his two feet, but those were the drawbacks when one locked herself in a cage with a tiger.

# # #

A month ago the Enterprise had been entangled in a cat-and-mouse game with a Romulan bird-of-prey that had dragged the Federation starship into a region of space of space along the border with the distant Cardassian Union. The crisis had not allowed them to properly map the area, but from what they had seen, it would not make for a place auspicious for interstellar traffic because of the violent plasma storms and many anomalies. Doctor McCoy had insisted they dub it the Badlands after their namesake in South Dakota. Going there was about as prudent as entering quick sand, but she could be certain it was somewhere nobody would dare or wish to follow her.

Once she was confident she had lost her track amid the meanderings of Federation-space traffic, she squared her shoulders against the prospect of interacting with Khan and transferred navigational control to the ship's trusty autopilot. She had her Starfleet-issued phaser on board, but she would have to get to the living quarters to retrieve it. She stood and rapidly whirled around her command chair only to find the augment still on the floor, curled in a near fetal position, eyes closed, face screwed into a pained grimace. Not wasting any time, she stepped past him and out into the corridor.

The Denobulan ship faithfully reflect the personality of its flamboyant owner: a narrow bridge of sorts with two consoles, solid shields yet minimal weaponry, a most generous database and a replicator superior to the ones on most Starfleet vessels, its programming including dishes from all over the Federation, which was fortunate since the cuisine of Phlox's people did not quite agree with human digestive systems. There was also a lavish bedroom decorated with exotic, brightly-colored plants and a fully-stocked medbay with more equipment on hand that she knew what to do with.

Armed with both her weapon and a tricoder she had snatched from the infirmary, she returned to the bridge only to discover that Khan did not seem to have moved. He was dressed only in a pair of loose drawstring pants and though the temperature on the ship was dialed to optimum comfort level for humans, he appeared to be shivering slightly. His ribs poked at the skin of his torso, as he had obviously been fed intravenously just enough for him to survive. Section 31 would not have wished him in top form, should he slipped out of his coma one day. Horror wared with pity inside her. No Federation institution, no matter how clandestine, should allow itself to sink this low in the treatment of someone, who was basically imprisoned without a trial.

She cautiously padded closer to him. "Khan," she called out, the name burning as it fell off her lips.

He twitched but gave no reply. Left without any other alternative, she crouched by his prone body and used the tricorder to run a basic scan, keeping her phaser aimed at him at him in her other hand. Though she had first aid training, she still was no medic, nor had she any idea what calibration to use for him. Either way, the results indicated vital signs that would have been too low for a mere human. He had been given powerful muscle paralytics aside from the sedatives and the neuro-inhibitors, but as far as she could tell, nothing that would cause permanent damage. Again, at least, not in a human. His chances were likely even better.

She contemplated how to go about locking him in the infirmary when he regained full control of his body. She would have to get him on a levitating stretcher and keep him on less toxic cocktail of drugs, while she came up with a long-term plan. Giving him any kind of freedom was tantamount to suicide. He cracked an eye open startling her out of her strategizing. "What do you want?" he asked tiredly.

"I'm going to move you to the medbay," she said, deliberately ignoring his query. "There I'll put you on another paralytic, but unless you give me reason to, I won't knock you out again."

When he didn't reply, she got to her feet and almost left the bridge again, when his voice interrupted her. "Whatever it is, I won't do it." He had shut his eyes again, his expression completely blank.

"You won't do what? Give me reason to knock you unconscious? Given the precedent, you'll excuse me if I don't believe you."

"So this is about revenge then. You kidnapped me so you could take your time torturing me to death without any disturbances."

The accusation stung, though he had certainly not voiced it like one. Instead, he had sounded strangely accepting and resigned. If she hadn't known better, she would say defeated. Still his words had made a dent, not because they were insulting, but because the reminded her of her glee at the thought of him in pain and she would have lied, if she had claimed she wasn't still tempted to make him suffer for what he had done to her.

"Would you stop?" she snapped, some of her anger self-directed. "I'm not going to torture you, for crying out loud."

"You don't sound very certain of that," he remarked in the same low monotone of before. He wasn't even looking at her, his gaze wandering aimlessly somewhere to her right.

A dark suspicion entered her mind, as she questioned just what Section 31 had put him through to make the collected and imperious augment so passive and listless. "The tricorder didn't pick up any signs of physical distress past the effects of the medication you've been pumped full of, but maybe that's because I don't know how to set it to properly read your metabolism so I'll just ask: are you in any kind of pain? Because if you are, I can try to find you something for it."

No reply was forthcoming so she made a dash to medbay returning with a stretcher and a thermal blanket. Covering him while still holding on to her weapon was not easy, but she managed. Rolling him onto the gurney posed a whole other set of logistical problems, however. She was about to tackle the task, when he spoke again.

"A bad cop, good cop scenario then," he offered in the same dully, inflectionless voice. "Whatever you're hoping to obtain, it's pointless. Unlike your father, you have nothing to hold over me anymore."

She looked him over again with an emotion verging on concern. He was still as a statue, not even trembling anymore under the blanket warming him up. The empty stare, though, was the most unnerving. She wondered if he had finally snapped. It wasn't like he had a lot of sanity to lose to begin with. She looked around despondently, for the first time in her life having absolutely no clue as to what to do next. She was trapped aboard a tiny craft with a completely insane genocidal tyrant. She had never felt more alone and had to both literally and metaphorically dig her feels in to keep from contacting the Enterprise, but she had gotten herself into this and she refused to drag down with her more people Khan had already victimized. She was well aware that the best she could hope for in the aftermath of this was her court-martial. The worst would have her killed.

Suddenly fatigued she sat cross-legged on the floor next to Khan, who still wasn't moving or looking at her. Her right hand still clutched her phaser. Just in case.

TBC


	6. Chapter 6

A/N: reviews keep the muse happy! :)

# # #

The Badlands was a more than appropriate name for that region, as well as confirming Doctor McCoy's claim that space was sheer danger. With no mapping available, she could not afford to let the autopilot control the ship. She had managed to get Khan on the biobed in the infirmary, dragging his unresponsive body on the stretcher exhausting her physically the same way her predicament had drained her mentally. Currently she was running on adrenaline alone, her mind focused solely on not ending up trapped in a plasma storm, as she maneuvered her vessel through uncharted territory.

Khan had yet to show any reaction besides the empty staring. She had suspected he had some sort of optical nerve-damage, but the two subsequent tricorder scans had revealed he was indeed in good health, if one discounted a very slightly elevated white cells count, undernourishment and one too many muscle-paralyzers. His passiveness unsettled her much more than any upfront confrontation could, because it could only mean one of two things: either he was lulling her into a false sense of security or he was truly in shock as a result of some torture Cartwright had conveniently left out of the conversation, in which case, lacking in psychiatric expertise as she was, she had no idea how to deal with him. What did one do when confronted with a potentially traumatized homicidal madman? She had never imagined she would come to wish he were as violent as she remembered.

Once she was confident she was deep enough within the Badlands for anyone to follow, she placed her ship in the orbit of a planet, the surface of which the sensors showed to be free of any ionic storms threatening the on board equipment. She lay her back against the command chair, letting out a long, deep sigh. Every muscle in her body was stiff with tension. She rubbed at eyes that felt dry and gritty and realized with a start that she was hungry and that she had forgotten the last time she had eaten something.

She made the trip to the living quarters and ordered two steaks and sugary desserts from the replicator, which she then carried into the medbay, where Khan was still staring at the wall. He made no effort to look at her, when she came in. She had given him something earlier that would prevent him from standing up, but by now he should have recovered enough use of his upper body so he could eat by himself.

"I thought you might want some real food," she said.

No response. She placed the tray on the bedside table, pulled herself a chair and grabbed her own place, hoping the scent would entice him to eat. No such luck. If he meant to wear her down through his creepy, silent posturing, it was working.

"Alright," she muttered in exasperation. "Let's get one thing very clear: I have no plans to make you build any ships or torpedoes for Starfleet and no intention of exacting a bloody personal revenge on you."

There was silence for a few moments more. Then he spoke: "Why not?"

Carol froze in place.

Khan lolled his head to look at her and she instantly wished he hadn't. His gaze burnt with a strange intensity that was unlike anything she had ever seen before. "I took your father from you. I killed him while you watched. When you tried to reason with me, I didn't even listen, I broke your leg and moved on to your father. Do you remember the fear on his face, as he died? I do. He died like a coward. He couldn't even look me in the eye, when his skull bones shifted under my fingers. I wonder: did you hear them crack?"

She slammed her plate on the bedside table, her appetite gone and her stomach spasming. "Stop," she cried out. "Just stop it!" Something stirred in her leg, as suffocating anger suffused her chest, nearly shutting her lungs down. She jumped to her feet and turned her back to him, aware even as she was doing it, that it was anything but wise.

"Even Kirk punched me in the name of his friend I've killed," he drawled on. "But not you. No, you want to be a saintly martyr, caring for your father's assassin. Tell me, what would he think, if he could see you now? Offering me food and pain medication. Would he be furious or... disappointed?"

She whirled around to face him again. There was glint of something much like madness in his eyes. "You're a monster," she murmured before she could think the better of it. Her leg was now positively smarting.

"Of course I am," he said casually. "And you apparently just rescued me from the people who treated me as such. Why would you do that, Carol? Even you can't be that naïve to believe I'll ever be allowed to stand trial."

Carol felt her eyes begin to water, as much as she hated the mere notion of crying in front of this man. It was true. She didn't know what hurt the most: the fact that she would never get justice for her father or that the idea that the equality the Federation was supposedly based on was not for everyone. Either way, it was most distressing that he didn't even have to lie to get to her. Still she refused to back down from his challenge.

"You," she spat through gritted teeth. "You presume to lecture me?! The man who kills fathers in front of their daughters and then gloats about it. You've crashed a ship into defenseless civilians. While we're on the topic of genocide, how many did you butcher during your reign of terror on a quarter of a planet?"

A shadow darkened his face. "At least, I didn't pretend to be better or talk about rights and due process. While you are being so self-righteous, perhaps you'd care to discuss how the Enterprise's first officer ended the lives of seventy-two people in their sleep?"

His voice nearly broke on that last sentence and in a flash of insight she understood why he behaved so weirdly. He thought his crew was dead. Of course. He probably had never been even awake after he had been transferred off the Enterprise.

"They're not dead," she said before she could help herself.

Something shifted in his expression and he frowned. "You're lying."

She bristled. "Just because you don't have a conscience, it doesn't mean that nobody else does. Spock took all the cryotubes out of the torpedoes, before he beamed them over. I saw your people in the Enterprise medbay with my own eyes. They're all alive."

Everything changed. He squeezed his eyes shut, the vacant expression melting off his face only to be replaced with a mixture of emotions she had a hard time reading: relief, hope, joy even cascaded over his features. His mouth fell open, lips trembling, and he sucked in a shuddery breath. His pallor seemed to deepen, if that were possible. His fist clenched in the blanket to the point where his knuckles turned white.

"Where are they?" he asked, his voice so low she had to strain to hear him. "Show them to me and I'll do anything you want me to." His eyes slid open, the look in them almost pleading. "There is no need to kill any of them."

She threw her hands up in the air. "For the last time: I have no intention of killing or torturing anyone. Nor is this a scheme. In fact, if it weren't for me, you'd still be a prisoner inside your own body, while Section 31 infected you with one deadly pathogen after another."

His features smoothed out, his eyes studying her attentively. "I see. So this is an attempt to prove to yourself that you're not your father," he said sardonically.

She glared at him. "Some of us don't go on a roaring rampage of revenge the second someone wrongs us."

"No," he bit out, his voice a menacing rumble. His awkwardly sit up, his sluggish moves betraying the weakened state of his body. "That was not revenge. Revenge would have been making him watch, while I killed you slowly and in the most painful way I could conceive."

She raised her chin in defiance. "Then why didn't you?"

"My quarrel was not with you."

"It certainly seemed like it was, when you broke my leg."

"You got in my way," he retorted with the air that her injury at his hand had somehow offended him.

She took a deep, calming breath. "If it wasn't revenge, then what was it?"

"Justice," he growled, looking away. "The only one my murdered family members would ever see."

"Murdered? What are you talking about? All seventy-two of your people were right there, in the torpedoes where you put them, when my father gave them to Kirk."

He looked at her then, the look in his eyes haunted. "There were eighty-three of them, when we left Earth."

The bottom of her stomach dropped out. She shook her head resolutely. "No!" She paused to dig her teeth into her lower lip. "I don't believe it. You're making it up, because you know I have no way of verifying it."

"He sent Kirk to kill me on Kronos with the torpedoes containing my people and almost destroyed the Enterprise, but you refuse to accept that he ended the lives of eleven alleged war criminals from the past, in order to force their leader to cooperate with him."

He was right. She knew it before he even spoke, yet for some reason, after everything she had been through in the past year and a half, that was the stroke that broke the camel's back. She pressed a hand to her mouth in an effort to stave off the mounting nausea, as fresh tears threatened to burst. Unable to stand being in his presence a second longer, she fled.

TBC


	7. Chapter 7

Carol sat in the Denobulan ship's command chair, staring into the dark vastness of space, which in the Badlands was disrupted every now and then by the golden edges of distant plasma storms. As the minutes piled into hours, she knew she should get up and refresh the drugs currently keeping Khan pinned to his medbay bed, but she could not bring herself to move. She was paralyzed, her mind restlessly turning towards thoughts all her therapists had warned her off. She went with a fine comb over every one of her interactions with her father during the year he had Khan prisoner, searching for the smallest indication of unease or of a guilty conscience. She wondered if her father had ordered the cold-blooded murder of eleven people and then gone about his business as usual, perhaps even had dinner with her the very same evening.

Nothing had seemed wrong. That thought rolled like a penny in a brain that refused to register any other. For a year her father had kept a man as a de facto slave of the Starfleet he headed, after having disposed of eleven sentient being in their sleep. She couldn't imagine the amount of hatred and bitterness someone as violent as Khan had gathered drop by drop in all that time, until he had found an outlet for it in the murder of both the guilty and the innocent. Had her father's actions pushed him over the edge and triggered the most gruesome events in United Earth's history since the Xindi attack of 2153? So much blood. At least some of it was on father's hands. On her. She would never be clean from it.

_If I'm not in charge, our entire way of life is decimated._

Her father's words to Kirk on the bridge of the Vengeance on that nightmarish day rang in her ears. How could she have missed her father's becoming so misguided that he had come to believe means, any means, no matter how appalling justified a hazy ends of security? Her father had been convinced that he had been doing the right thing, what was necessary for the protection of the Federation, and apparently, that was all it took for their civilized veneer to be discarded and massacres to be justified. She questioned whether Khan had had similar thoughts, when he had embarked on his one-man crusade against Starfleet. That was the most terrifying part of it: the flimsiness of the line separating the likes of Khan from people like her father or Cartwright. She recalled an argument from Dr. McGivers' PhD thesis on Khan, the assertion that his actions in the 20th century had been motivated by his conviction that he was humanity's savior, a bringer of peace and order.

Carol buried her face in her hands at a loss. Behind her the door to the bridge opened with a soft hiss. She lifted her head. "Have you come to kill me?" she asked without turning.

Tension coiled in the pit of her stomach. She was aware that, even in his diminished capacity, she could only fend him off for about a second, but she was determined to go down fighting.

"I've come to make a deal with you," said as impassively as ever.

"I don't know where your crew is," she replied while getting up.

He had put on a white medical shirt he had obviously found around the infirmary. He was leaning on the far wall, so pale that his skin seemed almost translucent, spread unnaturally tight over all too prominent bones. In the sickly-looking face, his eyes burnt like ocean-colored coals. Even with his accelerated recuperating abilities, the months of medically-induced coma were likely still taking their toll on his muscles, even discounting the side-effects of the medical experiments he had been subjected to.

"No, but you might might have an idea so to where your father's underlings could have spirited them," he wheezed out.

She hurried towards him acting on the impulse to help someone in obvious need. "You're even crazier than I thought, if you believe for one second that I'll take you anywhere near an inhabited planet."

"I don't care about the inhabitants of any planet in the universe. All I want is my people. Once I have them, I'll take them as far away from your precious Federation as possible. You'll never have to hear from us ever again."

She stopped short of getting into his personal space, watching him with wary eyes. He looked about to topple over any second now. "And you'll just leave us, inferior being, to our merry ways?" he inquired condescendingly.

His eyes narrowed dangerously. "Any illusions I might have harbored in regards to your kind died long before ancestors were born."

"You're breaking my heart," she sneered. "The people you put into death camps after occupying their countries revolted and overthrew you. How dared they not welcome your tyranny?"

His lips curved in a small, ugly grin. "Is that how your history books justify our extermination after we were defeated. If you truly want to know, I never conducted any massacres or purges. As for the war, I was attacked first so I stroke back. As simple as that."

"I suppose firing on a disabled Enterprise and crashing the Vengeance into San Francisco were acts of self-defense as well," she quipped.

"Destroying the Enterprise was merely a tactical decision. If I had let her be, you would have alerted the fleet, which would have pursued me immediately. But if they had to investigate her demise first and with Section 31 hampering that effort to cover its tracks, I would have had the necessary time to escape. As for San Francisco, my target was Starfleet Headquarters, not the city. If I were to die, I wanted to take with me as much of the institution that I thought had killed my family as possible."

"Reassuring as that might sound, I still won't help you. And there's nothing you can do to make me... and there isn't much you can do, while barely able to stand by yourself."

In an instant everything changed. He struck fast as a cobra, grabbing her wrist in clammy hands that turned into steel manacles, when she tried raising her elbow to hit him across the face, and spun her around to slam her into the wall, trapping her against it with his weight. "You should have killed me when you had the chance," he spat baring his teeth. A dark lock of hair fell over his eyes, which glinted maniacally.

An icy shiver licked at her spine, as her sense of self-preservation reasserted itself in the face of what was most likely certain death. However, she refused to show him fear. "No," she said quietly, comforted by the certainty that she would die doing the right thing. "I really shouldn't have."

Her words seemed to snap him out of whatever red daze he had temporarily slipped into, because, though his grip did not loosen, hesitation replaced the angry determination on his features. Then everything shifted again. The ship rocked, throwing them still tangled together halfway across the bridge. The back of her head hit the floor hard, pain exploding in the area of her nape, dizzying her momentarily. She whimpered, as her vision wavered and darkened.

"What's happening?" he asked from somewhere above her.

She reckoned that they hadn't been fired upon, lest the proximity alert would have warned of any approaching ship. "A plasma storm or an anomaly of some kind," she opined, as he grabbed her by her forearm and pulled her up on legs that felt like noodles. "Computer, status," she demanded.

"Main power failing. Navigational and anti-gravitational systems destabilized. Switching to auxiliary power now," the automatic voice replied.

"We're crashing," Khan added.

"Thank you, Captain Obvious," she muttered, as the planet they were orbiting tumbled perilously close into her clearing sight.

He dragged her to the co-pilot's console and dropped her unceremoniously into its respective chair, before taking over the command seat himself.

"What do you think you're doing?" she shouted at her wits' end. She barely knew how to steer the alien ship herself; she had no idea what good he imagined he would do.

To her surprise, he took over the helm with a few efficient moves, switched to manual and stabilized the ship right before impact. He guided the ship through the planet's atmosphere, encountering a few hurdles on the way, but the spacial anomaly that had nearly knocked them out of orbit did not follow them down. She was reluctant to put herself in his hands this way, but she had to admit it was in his best interest as well to preserved the Denobulan vessel intact and keep them from crashing. Given her splitting head-ache, she had to admit to it was probably safer to let him manage the ship, especially since she was drowsy enough to suspect a concussion.

Khan expertly landed them on the planet below on some sort of a cavernous plain, in a spot where they would be shielded from aerial view by a large rock formation. Apparently, the year spent with access to all kinds of Starfleet databases had paid off, where his enhanced intellect was concerned. The subsequent ship-wide diagnostic bore both bad and good news. The war drive and all essential systems were intact, but main power could not be brought online so they would have to rely on the shakier auxiliary one, if they wanted to leave, which in the Badlands could prove a fatal handicap.

"Where did you bring us to, anyway?" he asked irritably, as he was studying the starcharts on his console.

Carol felt the bump on the back of her head, the pain mounting, now that adrenaline rush caused by their near crash began to fade. "A frontier region named the Badlands. It's newly-discovered so it's not on the map yet."

He turned his head to look at her, arching a brow, as he did. "Was the rest of the galaxy temporarily unavailable?"

"History failed to record just how annoying you can be."

He seemed unfazed by her remark. "You've hit your head," he said dryly.

"Are you upset that this latest incident managed to inflict pain, before you could?" She winced wriggling in her seat to get more comfortable. "We should take all systems but life-support offline. Maybe if the reactor cools enough, we'll recover main power."

He said nothing but pressed a few keys on his console. The lights dimmed but did not switch off completely, signaling that he had taken her advice. Then, he stood, staggering ever so slightly as he did. She arched a brow at him and ignored the hand that to her surprise he had extended her. Digging her fingers into the edge of her chair, she dragged herself shakily to her feet and tried to walk towards medbay, but as soon as she had to abandon the support of her seat, her vision blackened again and she nearly fell. An arm reached over and steadied her. Her body moved, but she was not aware of her initiating it. She realized he had scooped her up in his arms, when her temple collided with his chest. Fresh nausea raised in her throat and she swallowed hard to keep it down.

He carried her to the infirmary, where he lay her on her side on the biobed. She winced, when his fingers probed at her nape, but she felt no violent intent behind his gesture, as the touch was rather gentle. With her line of work, this was by no means her first concussion so she knew exactly what to do. Just in case he truly meant her no harm at present, she instructed him how to use the regenerator on the impact area and what medicine to give her, which he did without protesting. Then, wonder of all wonders, he actually covered her with a blanket.

"Thank you," she said earnestly.

He didn't reply just sat on a nearby chair with a long, shuddery breath, since the tiny medbay only had one bed. His posture remained rigid, his back ramrod straight, his fingers splayed on his knees, his penetrating gaze aimed somewhere right above her. His face was hard to read, though he did seem slightly pensive.

She moistened her lips with her tongue trying to gauge where they could go from here. "The pill will take full effect in six hours. In the meantime I'm supposed to lie down . Maybe by then main power would have come back online."

His gaze flickered to her. "All this time my people are the mercy of Section 31." There was an edge of despair in his voice, as though his many failed attempts to recover his crew from Starfleet had pushed him over some internal barrier.

"I know Commodore Cartwright and he's a practical man. He wouldn't dispose of seventy-two people with your genes, just because I go you out." It chafed to refer to anyone as though they were objects, but she had no doubt that Cartwright would think this way so she had told him the truth.

His eyes bore into her skull, a maelstrom of conflicted emotions reflected in them. She had to wonder if this man was indeed the raging psychopath everyone thought him to be or someone who had been pushed over the edge and never found the means to come back.

"There are living quarters down the corridor. You could go lie down and have a real meal in there. You won't be of any help to anyone, while you can barely stand by yourself."

His gaze roved over her face curiously, but he did not budge.

"Don't worry, I'm not going to suffocate you in your sleep," she said pulling the blanket up to her chin. She could use some sleep herself under the circumstances.

A slight smile floated on his smile, irony lighting up his eyes. "No, you're not," he concluded and stood up. "Good night, Carol."

TBC


	8. Chapter 8

_Khan had been the last go to into cryosleep, just after making sure the tubes had locked safely around each and every member of his family. Then, he had launched the Botany Bay into the uncertainty of space. He had no idea whether there even was another planet besides Earth with life-sustaining conditions or if the ship had a realistic chance of getting away from the Sol system before an asteroid destroyed it. But so far they had at least made it out of Earth's atmosphere. He stared at the blue planet through the vessel's windows. _

_The war was over... and lost. He knew that he and the last of his people had been condemned to death, but unlike other augments, he had not made the mistake of waiting and therefore giving the humans the opportunity to capture them. He had recognized upcoming defeat in the break-down of the other augment states and in the growing armies of the human uprising. When he couldn't hold onto his capital, he had made a strategic retreat. He had been well aware that there was no place on Earth left for them to go so he had opted for the only road still available to them._

_The Botany Bay was an experimental space-exploring vessel built as part of an international project that had once been a last ditch effort at maintaining the peace. The good intentions behind the idea had proved to be an illusion, as war had soon raged, fueled by the worldwide augment take-over. The ship that had never been launched, despite her being fully-functional, and had been all but forgotten in the face of more pressing concerns. Commandeering her had been sheer simplicity. Earth had never been their home. Not truly. Despite the many tragedies of their common past, Khan bore humanity no ill will but hoped never to encounter them again. _

_Perhaps their ship would stumble upon an uninhabited planet they could finally call their own. _

# # #

_The face that leaned over his prone and still numb body was human and belonged to a man in his sixties. Steely blue eyes studied him shrewdly. Needles and pins began to awake in his limbs, as he slowly returned to full function. _

"_Khan Noonien Singh," said the man in a voice clearly accustomed to giving orders. "Welcome to the twenty-third century!"_

# # #

_Pain licked at his left arm, sharp tendrils wrapping themselves around bone and muscle and spreading further into his body. It evoked sense memories going back to his childhood, to the experiments performed on him in order to hone his remastered DNA to perfection. He shoved aside both the recollections and his current physical suffering. He knew Marcus was watching, waiting for his doctors' report on the wonders of his metabolism, and refused to give the head of the mixed human and alien not quite military force named Starfleet the satisfaction of seeing him distressed. _

_His body shook from the impact of a rather large needle inserted into his neck. He ignored the medics fussing over him, his gaze fixed upon the far wall. He didn't have the luxury of resisting. His people were beyond his reach, at the unreliable mercy of a man who wanted to exploit him the same way those who had manufactured him in a test-tube had intended to three hundred years ago. Anger and self-loathing suffused him. He had saved his family from one captivity and summary execution only to lead them straight into another trap._

_Their ship had docked too late. Space itself was now contaminated by those for whom they would never be more than a living tool built to last, a self-replenishing resource primed for use. It was of no import. Humans were no longer his concern, their new, high-tech world holding no appeal to him. He would do everything Marcus asked of him so he could keep his remaining crew alive and bide his time until he found them and then he would rip the admiral's head off his shoulders, before leaving this cursed blue planet once and for all._

# # #

_A gentle, ocean-scented breeze scented breeze ruffled his hair, as he gazed down upon San Francisco. The Vengeance's engines had been terminally crippled and the bulk of the ship had missed Starfleet HQ and hit the city in its heart. The rumble of destruction and anguish below reached his sensitive ears. Khan stifled the swan song of regret rising in him. He drowned it in the crimson hatred towards his family's murders. His journey had come to an end. He knew that every step he would take from now on was in the general direction of death, but he couldn't bring himself to care. He would soon be with his people again. That was all that mattered._

# # #

Khan awoke in pitch darkness. It made little difference to him. He saw better with the lights on, but no night, no matter how black, bothered him. The sleep, the warm shower and the meal had done him a world of good. His muscles had lost their stiffness and his reflexes were almost fully restored. He slipped out of the bed and stretched, taking a moment to bask in the rare feeling of wellness. He carefully weighed his options, as he ordered himself more food from the replicator. His body burnt fuel at the same high rate his metabolism functioned at and it would be a while, until the the effects of the months of malnutrition could be successfully erased. Even so, his strength was returning in doves.

The year he had spent with complete access to just about every technical database in the Federation, in order to supply Marcus with the weapons he yearned for, had provided him with the opportunity to learn to pilot the ships of various civilizations in the union. However, he still wasn't an engineer and if the ship's main power hadn't come back online, there was nothing to he could do about it. From Carol Marcus' reaction to the news, he had divined that a ship on auxiliary power had little chance of surviving a trip through the unchartered Badlands.

He slinked through the vessel that was quiet like a tomb and towards the engine room. The main power was indeed still down. Not letting the news affect him, he moved away, wheels already turning in his mind, as he pondered a back-up plan. He slipped into the infirmary on his way. Carol Marcus was still asleep, curled under her blanket on the biobed. She looked so small, vulnerable and infinitely breakable, though her heartbeat came through loud and strong in the silence of the room. Obviously the anti-concussion medicine had taken full effect and she was now resting fitfully.

Sun Tzu had said that if you knew your enemies and knew yourself, you would not be imperiled in a hundred battles. Khan had followed that ancient wisdom in the many wars he had fought and was well aware of his one weakness: kindness, not his own, but being shown it. Compassion was the last thing he had expected to see in the eyes of Marcus' daughter, especially after what had happened on the Vengeance, but it had been there and she had risked her life and career to rescue him from Section 31. Something tight coiled in his gut. His arm reached over, before he could summon the will to stop himself, and he gingerly pulled a corner of the blanket over her shoulder. She shifted slightly but did not wake up.

Frowning at himself, he backtracked and left the medbay as quietly as he had come in. He could not let his one blind spot deter him from recovering his family. They were everything he had in this world, the only ones to whom he owned loyalty and for them he would burn the galaxy to ashes and crush anyone who got in his way. Carol Marcus' integrity was a strategical advantage he could use in his quest. He returned to the living quarters, mulling the situation over, and replicated himself a coat.

According to the ship's computer, they planet they were on was Minshara-class so he could safely exit the vessel. The outside world did not look welcoming at all, but comfort had never been a priority of his. They were in a narrow, sand-covered valley surrounded by barren rock formations profiled against chestnut-colored skies. The air was rarefied, but that was no burden to his lung capacity. He climbed on the sharp edge of a stone and let his gaze wander over a plain that looked completely devoid of vegetation.

There was a certain solemness to the bare wilderness around him, one that he found calming. A memory of him giving a speech to a packed square intruded onto his thoughts and he shook his head to dispel it. The prince with the power over millions had been in another life. He needed to focus on the present. He lifted his eyes to the sky above. From what he had gathered from the coordinates inserted into the ship's navigational system, they were somewhere near the border with Cardassia, a decaying old galactic power, with which the Federation had had so far limited contact. Khan suspected they were keeping their distance, preferring to watch the evolution of the cold war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire from a safe distance.

If they managed to get the ship to one of the frontier colonies that, according to Starfleet Intelligence, were neglected by the central government, they could exchange the numerous medical supplies aboard for repairs. In the meantime, he would obtain the possible location of his crew from Carol Marcus. With the vessel under his control, he could slip back into Federation territory and retrieve them. Hope bloomed into his chest and he could almost taste the joy of being with them again. Not yet. They were still far away, still in the hands of the enemy.

Perhaps even now Cartwright took one of them out of the safety of the cryotube and infected them with a horrible alien disease, while they were trapped within their own body, just as he had been, completely helpless. He squeezed his hands into fists, irrationally regretting his freedom, if it meant that a member of his family had to suffer in his stead. Rage rose within him with enough strength to render him dizzy and he stared down at his hands, imagining what they would do to anyone who had dared touch his family.

Movement behind him disturbed him from his marauding thoughts and he whirled around to see Carol Marcus stand by the ship, looking at him with a new determination etched onto her features.

# # #

The sleep had done more than rid of the symptoms of her recent concussion. It had also brought all of her doubts were back. Though the recent revelations still haunted her, Khan's recovery had served as a bitter reminder of what he was capable of. The last thing she wanted was to be in some way responsible for him causing more destruction and death. He feared what he might do, if he were to take this ship back into Federation territory and wage a path of fire and blood in his quest to retrieve his people.

Given the fruits of her own independent research, she was inclined to believe his claims of not planning on any eugenic cleansing, once he recovered his crew. So her concern revolved around how he would go about achieving that goal. She guessed she would not like that particular answer. It occurred to her that she could sabotage the warp engine, stranding them on this planet. He would figure it out instantly and kill her for it, but at least he would not make any other victims. She was not keen on dying so soon but still felt responsible for his future actions, since she had been the one to set him free. At the same time, her conscience hackled at her over the fate of the seventy-two augments still in the hands of Section 31. She shuddered to think of the future awaiting them.

There was nothing clear-cut about her choice. Was she to be guilty of the deaths of thousands or the slow one of seventy-two?

TBC


	9. Chapter 9

Carol had an unhappy, pinched look about her. She took a few cautious steps in his direction, the sand crunching under her feet. Her whole body tension screamed tension. Instinctively he drew himself taller, every muscle in his body cording in anticipation of a fight.

"You were right," she began grimly. "I think I know where Section 31 might be keeping your people."

It was as though breath had been punched out of his body. His vision blurred and for a few moments he no longer had her before him but the coveted cryotubes. Relief and hope flared within him so strongly that it hurt. Her next words almost didn't register. _Conditions... . _She would tell him under certain conditions. Conditions... always conditions. Just like her father. Fury broke through joy, snuffing any consideration he might have spared her before. He had to physically restrain himself from grabbing for her.

"Your word," she went on. "Nobody else dies. I'll help you get them and then you go somewhere you won't run into Starfleet ever again." She was pleading, though her voice didn't waver, as she braved through, and her heart-beat spiked indicating anxiety. "It's a big galaxy and it's by no means lacking in empty, habitable planets." She paused to draw breath and it came out as a stuttered sigh. "If you're thinking about torturing the information out of me, you should know that no amount of pain will make me give it up."

He took one step closer, deliberately towering over her. She didn't back away.

"You believe yourself in the position to dictate terms?" he groused.

She glared at him defiantly. "I know I am," she said with a calm he was certain she did not feel, if her uneven heart-rhythm was anything to go by.

He decided to up the ante. "No, you are not. I can hear your heart-beat, Carol." His gaze slid to the pulse point in her throat before lifting to her face again. "And right now it's racing with fear."

His words did have the intended effect. She looked momentarily rattled before quickly recovering again, her facade shifting in place. "Good," she said in a low voice that had him instantly worried. "So you'll know that I'm telling the truth, when I say that I tampered with the warp core and if you want me to reset it so you could get off this planet, even limping on auxiliary power, you'd give me that measly assurance I asked for."

He did not think or hesitate before he tackled her, pushing her to the ground and trapping her small body under his weight. His fingers pressed into her temples without the force to dislodge the bones, but just enough to be a warning. She didn't try to resist, merely flinched, her face scrunching in pain. Her eyes clouded over and her breathing sped up so fast it very nearly reached the point of hyperventilation. Her heart-beat climbed to paroxystic levels. Her response sobered him. He had not meant to injure or kill merely remind her of what he could do. He needed her alive to tell him what she had done to the ship's engine.

Khan got off her and dragged her up with him, planting her on her feet with ease. She was blinking rapidly, visibly struggling to get herself under control. Her reaction made no sense. So far she had made a startlingly good job at masking her fear. It had to be something besides the proximity of death that had set her off. Then he realized: shock. He had inadvertently triggered a panic-laced memory of what had had happened aboard the Vengeance. He stepped back, opting to err on the side of caution. It would not do to either antagonize her completely or give her a heart-attack.

It did not take her long to look at him again and when she did, her face bore an expression of devastation, anger burning in her red-rimmed eyes. "Go ahead," she yelled, a hysterical edge making her voice shrill. "Do it. Kill me." She shoved at him chest. "Monster! Murderer!" Tears began to stream down her face but she ignored them. "What are you waiting for?" Her left hook caught him across his jaw.

He didn't retaliate. It wasn't as if she could do real damage and much like in Kirk's case on that fateful day on Kronos, he waited for her to get it out of her system so they could later talk rationally.

"You took him from me... . You killed thousands... . I should have left you there, to be Section 31's pin cushion."

She rubbed her tear-streaked cheeks with the back of her hands, looking hopelessly lost. Then she turned on a heel to leave but stumbled and almost keeled over. She seemed to be favoring her left leg, which she had definitely not done before. It was the same one he had once broken in his haste to get to her father. He recalled how vulnerable she had seemed in her sleep. She was even more so now, the suffering he had inflicted upon her in the past incurring her body's betrayal. The knowledge that he could easily snap her into two suddenly sat less than comfortably with him.

From a dark corner of his self, one the door to which he had thought forever sealed shut, pity reared its ugly head. It fluttered to life like a fragile, newly-emerged butterfly attempting to stretch its wings into flight. It was something he did not remember experiencing since the night he and his people had made their escape from his burning capital and he had looked back on the crumbling remains of his empire. It was true that she had never been an intended target; she had not wronged him. He had even less of a quibble with her than he did with Kirk, who had shot him in the back, after he had saved his life in the debris field between the Enterprise and the Vengeance.

He inched himself closer to her but wisely refrained for touching her again. "Come inside," he said in as neutral a tone as he could make it. "Prolonged exposure to this planet's atmosphere cannot be good for your lungs."

She said nothing but did hobble back to the ship. He kept a safe distance behind her. She went all the way to the engine room, where she slumped to a sitting position on the floor, back against the wall. She appeared more collected now, but what he could hear of her vitals told a different story. He moved to sit on the opposite side of the tiny, encased space, putting the warp core between them, its faint blue light throwing gleaming shades on the surrounding metal. The silence stretched heavy and cloying with only her uneasy breathing disturbing it.

"What?" she asked in a soft, toneless voice. "Nothing to say? No lofty words of crushing derision from the mighty Khan Noonien Singh?" She scoffed, when he didn't rise to the bait. "There never will be any justice for all the people you killed... for my Dad, because even if I could drag you back into Federation space to stand trial, neither Starfleet Command or Section 31 would ever allow you in open court, as you know too much. And if I get us stuck on this planet on a permanent basis so you can't hurt anyone anymore, I'd be condemning your crew to a slow, inhumane death." There was a rustle of clothing, as she shuffled around. "Maybe your makers had the right idea all along. Life without a conscience must be so much easier."

Her last phrase stung all the more, since she had not meant it as an insult. She was merely exhausted and at her wits end. The feeling of being trapped with no place to go was unpleasantly familiar.

"So you thought extracting a promise of good behavior was the answer?" he taunted, his anger directed at his own reaction to her statement rather than at her. "What makes you so certain I won't strike against Starfleet for what they did to me and my people?"

"Enough!" she snapped with more energy than he thought she could muster in her state. "You destroyed Section 31's London base, you killed countless Starfleet officers and the man directly responsible for what was done to you and you drove a massive ship into downtown San Francisco. Don't you think you've spilled enough blood? Then 31 put you through hell all over again. Where does it end?"

"Here." He stood and rounded the core to meet up with her again. "You have a deal." He stopped in front of her and extended his hand. "And my word."

She looked at him with mistrustful eyes but still put her hand into his, allowing him to pull her up before slipping her fingers free of his light grip. "I decoupled the warp field generator," she said inclining her head in the direction of the engine.

"I don't suppose you also know how to restore main power?"

She narrowed her eyes. "Destroying is much more easier than repairing, as I'm certain you're well aware."

He tilted his head to the side, scowling, as he fought down the urge to justify himself to her. But she was not waiting for an answer. She turned on a heel and strolled to a panel on the wall. "The space anomaly that hit us destabilized the computer's interface with the reactor. Even if I knew how to fix it, we don't have the necessary tools here," she explained while fiddling with the controls and wires on the panel. "Without main power, we have no shields, no weapons such as they were, restricted maneuvering capability and limited sensors range. If so much as an asteroid comes our way, we won't see it until it's too late."

He told her of his plan to get to the Cardassian border. She finished with the panel and the warp core flared brightly to life as a result. She pivoted back towards him. "That would actually be a good idea," she said wryly.

"But you don't know how to reach Cardassia from here?"

She arched an eye-brow at him. "I wasn't being metaphorical, when I said the Badlands are unchartered territory."

He pondered the problem for a second or two. "Starfleet and the Cardassian Union have so far done an excellent job at ignoring each other, but the Denobulans have had warp capability considerably longer than humans so they might have had much more extensive contact with your silent neighbor."

"So there may be coordinates of border colonies in this ship's database and we could calculate a route there based on them," she concluded, quickly catching onto his idea.

# # #

Carol leaned back in the copilot's chair on the bridge, reaching to rub unconsciously at her still smarting leg. Her mind was frantic, buzzing with triangulations of the location of a small, impoverished Cardassian colony in the Olmerak system. They had managed to pinpoint a more or less precise way to reach it, though, unable as they were to use the ship's warp drive to full capacity, the journey would take them an estimate of up to three weeks, while manually helming the vessel through the menacing unknown of the Badlands. It was much longer than her shore-leave and the Enterprise crew would undoubtedly discover that she had lied about her location and report her missing. It was of no import. She had already written off her career. Under the circumstances, she wasn't even sure that she could continue as a Starfleet officer.

That one was a concern best postponed for later, however. Right now she had worry about surviving a few weeks in the Badlands on minimal power while watching her back, given with whom she shared the crippled Denobulan ship. They depended on each other to survive, until they could get it repaired. But afterwards all bets were off. That was precisely why she had no intention of telling him where she thought his crew was, until she could wriggle her way to a more equal footing. So far he hadn't asked again, most likely concocting some scheme to wear her down in this unexpected time window he had.

"We will need to pilot the ships in shifts," he said with a slight frown while still studying his console. "I can be fully functional without sleep for seventy-two hours so you can take all the time you need to rest in between turns."

She shook her head. "I saw plenty of stimulants in the infirmary. Without proper sensors, we'll need two pair of eyes to make it through this trip."

He lifted his head to stare at her, the look of concentration on his face so intense, it was as though he aimed at reading her mind. He probably did. "Fine," he conceded. "But you'll stop for a break at the first sign of exhaustion." The man had a true talent for sounding both condescending and reasonable at the same time. With a hint of authority.

"No, I look forward to planting us in the middle of a plasma storm," she retorted and paused letting the moment slip. "Ready to go?" she asked gesturing to the controls. There was no point in delaying their departure. The terms of their uneasy armistice had been set and the ship was clearly not going to improve on its own.

Khan's customary mask of impeccable calm did not waver an inch. If he felt any apprehension or even a surreptitious nudge of a sense of self-preservation he had yet to demonstrate, he gave absolutely no indication of it. Even Kirk, who was famous as a dare-devil among Starfleet captains, had his moments of self-doubt, for which he compensated with his cock-sure attitude. Not Khan. The only time she had seen a dent in that steely confidence had been when he had believed his people dead. She briefly wondered if he was truly that unfazed by impossible odds or if his devotion to his family was indeed so fanatical. It had to be staggering and also a bit terrifying to have someone capable of going to such extreme lengths for you.

"Of course," he said firmly and initiated lift-off maneuvers.

TBC


	10. Chapter 10

Carol awoke on the floor, tangled in sheets, the force of the impact resounding in her bones. Her right shoulder ached, but she doubted she had anything broken. She staggered to her feet and shed the bed clothes wrapped around her body. The ship was still tilting but not perilously so. She ran a hand through her hair and sprinted towards the bridge, still barefoot and in her night-gown. The vessel shifted again, threatening her balance once she arrived there, but other than that she succeeded in making her way to the copilot's seat without any incidents.

"What happened?" she asked Khan who was pouring over the settings of the command console.

"Plasma storm," he replied in a clipped tone.

She tapped at her own console to discover they had narrowly avoided the eye of it, but not before being thrown off course. Again. She assisted him in the maneuvers to wrench their fragile ship away from danger and place themselves in the orbit of a nearby moon with as little hurdling as possible. Only when they were safe she allowed herself to sigh. They would have to redo the calculations of their route and hope they hadn't somehow ended deeper into the Badlands. Either way, their uncertain journey to the Cardassian border had just become longer.

"You can go back to your rest." His deep baritone startled her out of her bleak musings. "You have only been slept for two hours."

She rubbed at her eyes, but she wasn't tired anymore, still riding the adrenaline high. They had been on their way for five days now and they managed not to interact more than strictly necessary to keep their vehicle in space and moving. He had wordlessly made the medbay his own, leaving the actual living quarters to her. Since it had the only replicator on board, he actually made the effort of asking for access each time in a tone placed on that knife-edge between condescension and real request. So far they had avoided another crisis. But the balance was delicate, the air rife between them with tension.

"We'll have to wait out the worst of the storm," she concluded after a cursory look over the sensor reading. Another delay. If they were lucky, it would only be a matter of hours. If they weren't, it could be days.

"I know," he said flatly. He only then turned his head to glance at her, his expression as serene and contained as ever. As if they had not just survived another close call. "The inertial dampers didn't respond properly, when I pulled the ship away from the storm. Did you hurt yourself?" he asked, his eyes darkening slightly. Or perhaps it was just a trick of the light.

"No," she answered.

Her shoulder would bruise, but it was nothing a dermal regenerator could not fix. A second later she realized she was still wearing her tiny slip of a nightie with a very low cut. Normally she wouldn't have thought twice of it. She was, after all, still a Starfleet officer trained to solve the problems first and worry about one's state of undress later. Besides, she had been living within collective arrangements since she had left for boarding school at the age of eleven, during which times her main concern had been not offending the modesty of alien species. But now her lack of clothes made her feel somehow even more vulnerable, which was something she sought to avoid in front of him at all costs. As he seemed satisfied with her reply and had turned his eyes to the console, she stood intent on going to change.

"Where are they?" he asked, voice even deeper than usual, a hit of something like beseeching coloring it. His eyes were still trained on the view screen, which displayed the might of a plasma storm at its peak, golden torrents of swirling particles coalescing against the darkness of space. The phenomenon resembled him, as both they were fearsome, enigmatic and implacable. And she was caught between them.

She knew of whom he was inquiring. He was probably trying to manipulate her, now that he had become aware that she would not respond to threats. "I will tell you, once we've got the ship repaired. If I do it now, what guarantees do I have that you won't kill me immediately after?"

He turned to her and got to his feet as well. "I may be able to hear the beat of your heart in close proximity, but it's still not enough of an indication of whether you're telling me the truth or not. I won't know for certain, until I find them. So you see I depend on what you know, just as much as you depend on me to survive these Badlands."

It was like playing chess with a viper, never knowing when the snake would reach over and bite. "You don't have the best track-record with cooperating with people who depend on you."

He winced, briefly squeezing his eyes shut. "Kirk shot first... literally."

"Oh, someone double-crossed you, before you could do it to them. I imagine that must sting."

He scowled, a shadow passing over his face. For some reason her blow had landed. The hair on the back of her neck stood on an end, as every one of her instincts warned her not to provoke him further.

"My crew was on the Enterprise, in the hands of members of the organization that had already killed eleven of them," he bit out, his voice raising a little. "Do you think I would have taken any action that might have endangered them? I factored taking over the Vengeance as a possibility, but if it had freed my family, I would have given your captain his pound of flesh."

She scoffed. "You expect me to believe that?"

"Why not? You believe that your precious Federation is a paradise of equal rights and justice, yet it only takes one hint of a threat for you to shed your civilized veneer. Your forefathers even wrote a legal alibi into your revered Charter. So I should rather think you'd believe anything."

"You're the one to talk?"

His mouth quirked in a sneer. "Yes, Lieutenant Marcus, I am exactly the one to talk." He took step closer, his next words coming out laden with venom. "Your shadow of heaven comes with a price and you need the lie to preserve the illusion. Just like you need the fantasy that the Eugenic Wars and everything that preceded them were exclusively our doing, because superior ability breeds superior ambition. Do you know who said that?"

"Rudolph Heisen, the creator of the first human augmentation project," she answered automatically.

"Human augmentation? They didn't want superhumans, they wanted slaves, soldiers they could send to death without a second thought. And then one day we bit the master's hand."

Carol looked away, unable to stand his heated gaze any longer. A lump formed in her throat, restraining her breathing. She wanted to cry, to scream and to demand explanations. She knew what he meant: nothing had changed. Not truly. Three hundred years, space fairing and technological wonders and they were right where they had always been. Khan had been made in a lab as a slave and her father and through him Starfleet had treated him like one.

"What were their names?" The words scorched her throat, but she forced herself to continue. "Your people, those my father killed... what were their names?"

She slowly turned to look at him again. He was staring at her wide-eyed and crestfallen. His skin was paper-white, the lines on his forehead and around his eyes suddenly very prominent. Three centuries. He was three centuries old and all of the sudden and absurdly so, he seemed to look it.

"Why?" One word, uttered with a depth of pain and anger that for all that she had seen of him, it still shocked her. The sentiment in his voice appeared almost weaponed, each letter delivering the force of a phaser blast.

Worse over, she had no answer for him. Not one that would not add to his grief. She wanted the names, because she needed to assign them sentient beings status in her mind. She didn't want them to remain a footnote nobody would ever register. A bloody, senseless act that never

"Get out," he rasped. "Go!"

She shook her head. She knew they were right on the edge of another disaster but could not make herself pull back. "Then at least tell me why he did it?" she asked and watched a muscle jump in his jaw, fury supplanting the anguish written so plainly on his face. "Please," she insisted.

He tilted his head to the side, apparently considering her plea. "You assume I did something to provoke him."

She shook her head no. "I just want to know why."

His face skewing into a deep, pained frown, his fingers forming fists at his sides. "I refused to cooperate. I told him I didn't care about any Federation and new wars. I demanded my family and for us to be left to go. When he didn't yield, I begged and that was when he understood my weakness." A lone tear slid from his left eye and ran down his cheek.

"I'm sorry," she said, the words rolling off her tongue with surprising ease. If anything, they made breathing less of a chose. "Please, forgive us."

Bewilderment filtered into his expression. His mouth fell open, but he didn't speak. He just stared, the intensity in his multicolored eyes unnerving.

"There is a forbidden planet in the Talos star group," she said at last. "The forth one in the Talosian solar system. I don't know the reason. The file is for Command eyes only. But the third planet is only restricted and it's occupied by a research base established by Starfleet but run by an independent source. It would make the perfect place to keep your people. Now you know. Do what you will."

Mixed feelings swirled on his face, before relief emerged triumphant. "Thank you, Carol."

# # #

Khan did not kill her. In fact, he let her leave the bridge without a word. Once in her quarters she realized her hands were trembling. Her stomach was in knots. Though she did not use to medicate herself in such manner, she began to dig through the place in search of some strong alcohol. She did feel a bit guilty about it, going through Doctor Phlox's things like this, after nearly getting his ship destroyed. But she desperately needed a drink. She also longed for a hot shower, but the vessel only had sonic ones.

She had better luck on the alcohol front, when she found a box that might as well have doubled as a mini-bar, as it was filled with bottles of Risan wine, Finnish vodka from Earth, Saurian brandy, Andorian ale and Draylaxian whiskey. She dressed and camped on the floor with the latter and a tumbler. The beverage was stronger than any of its Terran equivalent, its taste rich and smoky as it burnt down her throat. She relished it and refused to ponder the wisdom of getting drunk under the circumstances. For once she didn't want to think, fear and make hard moral choice. All she wanted was to forget.

She was finishing her second glass, when her door chimed. "Enter," she called out, aware that her reprieve was over.

Khan paused in the door, his eyes sweeping over the room before stopping on the drink in her hand.

"Would like some?" she asked brandishing her newly emptied glass.

He shook his head as he came in. "It would be wasted. My metabolism absorbs alcohol, before it can begin to affect me."

She poured herself some more. "You can't get drunk? Your makers were right bastards."

Her attempt at humor fell flat. She cringed at it herself. It served as a reminder that she should not be drinking on an empty stomach and especially given her being unaccustomed to dawning glass after glass of strong spirits. But she didn't stop herself. Instead, she swallowed another gulp.

Khan moved inside and sat himself on the floor across from her. His gaze was on her, pensive and aloof, reminding her of him sitting on a biobed in the Enterprise's infirmary, analyzing them just as Doctor McCoy had studied his blood, as he had attempted to unlock its secrets. Had he known back then who her father was or had he figured it out, when Kirk had called her the admiral's daughter on the Vengeance?

"Do you still wish to learn about my people?"

She nodded and donned the last of her drink, setting the empty glass down.

TBC


	11. Chapter 11

Khan had never told anyone his story. The only people whom he could trust with it were his family and they had lived it with him. As a ruler of a quarter of Earth, he had had to be careful with the imagine he had projected as well as not give his numerous enemies any more ammunition to use against him. Alexander Marcus had never asked, not that Khan would have given him any details about himself. But then again nobody before had ever asked his forgiveness, either. Her apology had staggered him and the ensuing act of penance, the leap of faith she had taken in telling him his people's location, had floored him completely. He was rarely unsure of how to act, but he was a warrior so he went to confront the situation head-on, squashing any hesitation on the way.

He found her on the floor drinking, crumpled under the weight of what had gone on between them. It gave him no amount of satisfaction. He had meant it, when she had told her he bore her no ill will. With her father dead at his hands and his lost friends avenged, the issue of the debt her parent owned him was tabled, as far as he was concerned. If she instead had sought revenge on him, he would have fully understood, yet she seemed intent on demonstrating herself that she was above all that and hold onto her sense of right and wrong, that despite himself, he could not help but feel wry respect for her. He might not agree with her principles, as in her place he would have struck without hesitation, but he had to admire her loyalty to her morals.

Her regret was unwarranted. There was no blood on her hands. Her decency almost demanded repayment. So he sat in front of her and the words just poured out of him. Measured words of a story that at times seemed to have happened to somebody else. At first, she stopped drinking, then after a while they relocated to the table and he got them food from the replicator. He kept talking through their meal, his eyes fixed on her meticulously cutting into her roast beef, dragging the bit through the sauce, and loading her fork with vegetables. She then chewed every mouthful with extra care, ending up eating a lot less than she should have, considering how much alcohol she had just imbibed.

He told her of his birth, son of the first generation of test-tube modified embryos, implanted in the womb of one of the founders of the medical facility in Northern India, where of his kind had been created. Dr. Sarina Kaur had never seen herself as his mother, considering his birth merely a successful result of the experiment. She had not even given him a name. None of them had had names, in fact, only serial numbers. They had taken names by themselves, inspired by the region the lab was located in or borrowed from the books their supervisors had them read. He told her of growing up in sterile rooms with bunked beds, of white corridors, of armed guards and electrified fences surrounding cement courtyards, of abusive instructors and of nurses reprimanded for showing them affection, of endless experiments using early and unreliable DNA-resequencing techniques in order to improve their capabilities, of their thinning numbers, as some procedures back-fired or when some of them were sold to dictators and terrorist organizations to assure that continuing funding for research that been mostly illegal and highly unethical even then.

He told her of the escape he had orchestrated, of his killing Heisen, of being hunted, of finding out there were similar medical facilities in poor countries, where the threat of starvation and the corruption of local governments had allowed ambitious scientists and unscrupulous businessmen to conduct banned medical research. But he did not mention that he had spared Sarina Kaur and kept discreet tabs on her, practically watching her obsession with genetic engineering destroy her. He spoke of contacting running augments from other laboratories, of their concerted take-over, of his empire, of the short-lived peace it had enjoyed, until it had been attacked by his augment neighbor, Harulf Ericsson, who had thought he could contain the human rebellion within his borders by extending his kingdom. Before long the human revolt in Ericsson's kingdom had spread to his and he had been fighting a war on two fronts.

It was during his tale of the war that she began drinking again, pushing the plate of food aside in favor of the bottle of alien whiskey. He found himself unconsciously pushing her untouched dessert towards her. She didn't comment on it, merely filling a tumbler and taking a swig. He moved to the replicator to get himself a second serving, relieved both that his appetite had returned and that unlike the ones Starfleet utilized, this machine delivered food that tasted like the real thing.

He did not tell her that he and his family had only escaped thanks to the diversion one of his human generals had lead during the enemy assault on his fallen capital. The general had been captured alive and torn to pieces by a furious mob. He did tell her of the launch of the Botany Bay and of waking up in the twenty-third century, carefully evading any mention of the displacement he had felt at first. He did speak of the family members Marcus had killed, of their names and of their lives, his gaze fixed on her emptying bottle. She did not cry again only drank in bigger and bigger gulps, her eyes going glassy. There were spots of pink high on her cheeks and her hand was now unsteady, as it grabbed for the bottle.

"You'll get alcohol poisoning," he warned, placing a hand over her glass.

"We've got a cure for that now," she said dully.

He dragged the tumbler away from her, the glass racking against the odd metal of the table.

She shook her head, seeming at a loss. "If your crew is not on Talos III, I have no idea where else they might keep them," she added, slurring only a bit.

That had occurred to him as well, but her theory made sense and given the extent of Federation space, he might as well start the search somewhere. He made the short trip to the replicator to get her some water, which she did not touch, still staring emptily into space. He recognized the look on her face: it belonged to somewhere whose entire world was collapsing around them. Compassion sprang to life withing him again, but he shoved it aside, rationalizing it as concern that her defeatist attitude might impact negatively the rest of their trip. He knew it was not true, even as he thought it: she did not need her to make it to the Cardassian border. He could pilot the ship for the long hours it took until he tired and then parked it in a safe spot while he rested.

"You adapted to the change in technology very quickly," she remarked in the same toneless voice.

"Once I got used to the tridimensionality of space, it was easy. The mind is its own place, not to be changed by place and time," he paraphrased, mentally apologizing to Milton for meddling with his poetry.

She blinked owlishly. "Are you... quoting?"

He slid the water across the table and closer to her. "Paradise Lost," he explained.

"Milton? I would have pegged you for a Nietzsche admirer."

He grimaced. "They accused me of genocide and following Nietzsche philosophy?"

She cackled dryly. "There's one cliché that will never recover."

"Have some water and then you should lie down," he advised after a few tense moments.

She stared at him in wide-eyed shock and then threw her head back and started to laugh maniacally. "And now... we're in an absurdist play," she wheezed. She dissolved into tears, her shoulders trembling with the sobs. "I'm in a nightmare and I can't wake up," she whispered so softly, he only heard her thanks to his enhanced aural acuity. She hid her face in her trembling hands.

He went to her and gently helped her to her feet. She swayed a little and he put his hand on her left upper-arm to steady her. She stiffened and gaped at him with puffy, wet eyes. They were mismatched: the right one blue and the left one green. He hadn't had a reason to pay it any heed before.

"It's alright," he assured. "I won't hurt you."

"You don't...," she began, voice quaking. "You can't imagine how I want to hate you."

"I know," he said.

Khan guided her to the bed and helped her lie down. He pulled her shoes off and then grabbed of corner of the duvet to cover her. "You can sleep, until the storm dies down."

Carol buried her head into the pillow, squeezing her eyes shut. He left the glass of water on the nightstand within her reached, before he ordered the lights off and left.

# # #

Carol stumbled to the infirmary, her head pounding. Her mouth felt like cotton and tasted positively fetid. She rifled through the supplies, until she found something that would eradicate the worst of her hang-over symptoms. She could never hold her liquor very well, though to be fair, she had little practice in that area. One did not get a PhD in applied physics and graduate from Starfleet Academy before thirty while being a hardcore party-girl. She had spent her teen years making her way to Oxford and her twenties blazing a path through a highly-demanding field, competing with both humans and aliens more intellectually-gifted than them. That had meant Saturday nights spent in labs and libraries rather than bars and canceled weekend get-aways. Christine Chapel had once suggested more or less seriously that Carol had opted for a specialty that allowed her to professionally blow up stuff to relieve some of her stress and frustration.

After her trip to medbay, she showered and changed. One omelette with toast later, she began to feel more like herself so she grabbed a coffee and made her way to the bridge, where she found Khan studying starcharts. He looked up and straight into her eyes.

"How is the storm?" she asked in her best casual voice.

"Finally winding down," he replied in a neutral tone.

She sipped at her coffee, as she strolled towards the second seat. She would not acknowledge the strange and inexplicable thing that had gone between them earlier. She had been drunk and emotionally raw. Her nerves had been frayed. And they were currently under a lot of pressure. That was it. Even so, she knew he would not soon forget everything he had told her. It had the ring of truth and fit some of the monographs she had read on him so she couldn't dismiss it as lies, either. Maybe it was unfair, but wanted to. It would allow her to go back to thinking of him as that monster who had murdered her father.

"How are you feeling?" he wanted to know.

"Fine," she said, her fingers speeding over her console's commands, as she checked the meager data the ship's sensors had gathered on the storm. It was beyond anything cosmologists had ever theorized about plasma storms and she could only imagine the important information a ship like Enterprise could have stored on the phenomenon. "I am fine," she added in one rushed breath, acutely feeling his eyes on her. However, he did not bring up their extended conversation, either.

TBC


	12. Chapter 12

A/N: if you read it, please tell me what you think, whether good or bad.

They had been thrown off course thrice, the frailty of their ship in the face of space disturbances making Carol think of the wooden vessels at the mercy of the oceans of Earth. Each new deviation added to the journey, until it got a week longer than initially anticipated. If Khan was frustrated with this new development, he didn't show it, his laser focus on navigations. Or perhaps his unperturbed calm hid more strategic planning. Either way, his confession had lifted the cloud of tension hanging above their interactions and they were now working together with considerable ease. He also seemed to be recovering nicely from the ordeal Section 31 had put him through. He even gained some of his lost weight back, losing some of that frightening skeletal look. His eyes had cleared up. His recovery was even more obvious in the swift and sleek way he moved, like a panther on the prowl.

It was all the more evident in the impeccably straight line of his body, reshaping muscles pushing against the material of his shirt, the tendons in his neck stretched to perfection, as he stood in front of the starcharts on the view-screen at the back of the bridge. They were almost at the Cardassian border, tucked in the safety of a small asteroid field. Carol reviewed the sensor data and walked up to his side.

"The only way we can reach Talos III is through Federation territory," she said tapping a finger nail against the rim of the tea cup she was holding.

He raised his right eyebrow by a fraction of an inch. "We?"

"Yes," she said adamantly. "You promised me nobody else would die and I'm going to make sure you keep your word."

He didn't point out that she didn't have much in terms of options of stopping him from killing anyone. "And then?" he asked in carefully controlled voice.

She glowered at him, as her hackles started to rise. "You said the Federation would never hear from you again."

He turned his head to look her in the eye, his gaze as penetrative and inquisitive as ever. "You won't! I plan to take a sturdier ship from whatever base we will find on Talos III and take my family to the region marked as unexplored here," he said gesturing towards the wide pocket of space between the Tholian and Cardassian frontiers. "We will never return," he added, pale lips pulling back from over his teeth. "I was inquiring about you."

"Good to know you're planning to let me alive, when this is over," she quipped. He made a show of rolling his eyes at that. She pursed her lips. "I will be court-martialed for deserting my post. Cartwright won't even have to come up with a trumped-up charge."

He inched himself closer, his face pinching into a stern expression. "Cartwright will make you disappear."

"I have to go back," she said tightly.

"There is a difference between going back to your death and going back to tell Section 31 that if anything happens to you, every news service in the Federation will receive a recording of myself recounting all of my dealings with them."

Carol froze, arrested in place by the intensity of his gaze. "Only that there is no recording!"

"There is, if I make one for you."

"Why? Why would you care what happens to me?"

"I wouldn't, but you rescued me and now you're helping me find my people, which leaves me in your debt."

She made to step aside. "That's not why I did it."

He lightly gripped her upper arm to stop her from moving away. "I know. This is precisely why I'm offering."

She shrugged free of his touch and he allowed it. She strolled back to her seat, her body numb, yet her mind turning feverishly. If she had actual, hard evidence of Section 31's existence, then she could expose them and stop the cogs of this monstrous machine.

"Your great accomplishments are routed in mechanical improvements, but improve man and you gain thousandfold. But even someone who is better at everything has at least one flaw," he said.

He had come closer, towering over her. Carol stared aimlessly at the asteroid-peppered cosmos outside the ship's windows. She knew what he hinted at: not even he was flawless. The genetically-engineered supersoldier had emotions of a potency no human could hope to match. She ran a hand through her hair. "Is this your way of telling me nothing is perfect?"

"If a battle cannot be won, do not fight it," he said mildly in that rumbling, low baritone of his.

"Says the person who waged a one-man war against Starfleet." There was no heat in her voice and she looked up at him with slight smile, even as she spoke.

A hint of a grin flourished on his lips. "No, that was something Sun Tzu said. And I did not wage a war against Starfleet, I went on a suicide mission intent on taking as many of enemies with me as I could."

She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. "Shit! You didn't run off to Kronos to hide, did you? You dared my father to come after you."

He snarled and sat behind the command console in that imperious way that was his alone.

"I can't just let this slide," she said with finality.

He slammed his fist down on the console. "Do you think that if you do this the pain in your leg will somehow go away? That it will prove that you are not a victim? That it will make you feel less culpable for not suspecting what your father was hiding? Or do you simply wish to kill yourself?" He inclined his head in her direction, his pinpoint pupils dark and laser-focused digging relentlessly into her own gaze. "You're not responsible for what Alexander Marcus did, nor are you a victim, but you will be, if you embark on a crusade you cannot hope to win against Section 31."

His words cut deep, his insight disconcerting. There was a pause, enough for the silence between them to become oppressive.

"If you want it, that recording is yours. You choose what to do with it," he said a while later, his voice now level. "We are nearly at the border. You should get some rest, before we cross it."

# # #

If their mission had been Starfleet sanctioned, crossing the Badlands in a small Denobulan ship functioning solely on auxiliary power would have been one for the history books. Things being what they were, Carol was grateful she and Khan had managed not to kill each other on the way. They were now in their respective seats on the bridge looking at the Olmerak system on the view-screen.

She rested her head against the back of her chair. "Is this a bad time to tell you I don't speak Cardassian?"

He gave her a wan smile. "This close to the frontier it's likely someone on the colony knows Standard."

The ship had no transporter capabilities so they landed it on the outskirts of a town on the first inhabited planet they found. The city looked worse for the wear: barely scraped together buildings, dirty streets and Cardassians who averted their eyes, as Khan and Carol passed them by. As they moved deeper in, they came across other races as well, the colony's border outpost status obvious in its mixed character. They arrived at a sort of bazaar buzzing with commercial activity. Carol asked the first Orion they came across about an engineer capable of repairing Denobulan ships, explaining that they were peddlers whose vessel had been caught in a space anomaly.

The woman, a tall blue Orion, eyed their long, black overcoats with hoods suspiciously. Carol pushed her cowl back, releasing her hair to be ruffled by the soft breeze floating around. The air smelled of sea and rotten food. The Orion smiled slightly, her eyes arrested by the sight of Carol's blond hair.

"I heard humans have yellow hair, but I never thought it was true. There is a former starships engineer two streets from here, at the edge of the market. He's Cardassian, but he's trustworthy." The woman's smile grew coy. "Now, I believe I'm due a reward for the information."

From the corner of his eye, Carol saw Khan take an almost imperceptible step closer to the alien. "What kind of reward?" Carol asked carefully.

The Orion's dark eyes darted nervously to a still hooded Khan, the imposing straightness of his posture radiating danger. The woman hesitated, shifting her weight from one foot to another. Carol stepped between them. There was no point in them attracting further attention to themselves. "What would you like?" she insisted.

The alien seemed to regain some of her sang froid. "A lock of your hair," she answered in one breath.

"No," Khan said firmly from behind her, his voice low and menacing.

Carol put up a gloved hand. "It's alright."

She had a vintage, 21st century Swiss army pocket knife, a birthday gift from her Academy mates, on her so she pulled it out and quickly chopped a small lock of her hair, which she then handed to the Orion who snatched it with a wide, fascinated grin, before casting yet another wary glance in Khan's direction and hurrying away. Carol watched her until she disappeared in the crowd then turned to her augment companion. "Shall we?"

The Cardassian engineer was old but moved with sufficient vigor and best of all, spoke a broken Standard. He showed definite interest when Carol mentioned that they could trade medical supplies for his services. He took a younger Cardassian and some instruments Carol didn't recognize with him, when they lead him to their ship so he could look it over. Khan let her conduct the negotiations, only surveying the proceedings from a distance, his quiet yet powerful presence visibly intimidating their alien contractors, who kept darting anxious looks towards him. Carol had a feeling that they would not have to worry about them getting double-crossed or attacked.

The Federation might not have a currency-based economy, but many Starfleet officers, Carol herself included, carried with them several items that could be used for a trade-off with civilizations outside familiar borders. So she handed the engineer her samples of Terran and Vulcan spices exchange for his working through the night to get the ship ready in the shortest amount of time possible. While he worked, he recommended them an inn not far away from where the vessel was parked.

She paid for their rooms and meals with a few Spican flame gems she had won at the Dom-jot table during a long, dull cultural exchange program on Andoria, back when she had still been an ensign. The chambers were small to the point of claustrophobic, but they looked clean and had en suite, sauna like baths with real water. The inn's restaurant, however, smelled profusely and unpleasantly of fish and lacked anything with caffeine. So they ordered food and camped by an opened window. They waited for a long while, until the waitress returned to them with two large bowls of pieces of a gelatinous, green mass sticking out of a a milky, white sauce. It didn't smell bad per se, but the scent was not appetizing, either. That did not seem to deter Khan, who diligently applied himself to the task of eating the congealing, uneven course.

The waitress came again slamming two tall mugs of steaming liquid on their table. Carol snatched one and breathed in the pungent smell. She blew over it and took a tentative sip. It tasted as spicy as she imagined, but otherwise, it was delicious.

"You should not have given the Orion that lock of hair," he said, his gaze washing over her face, shifting his attention from his meal to her.

She shrugged one shoulder. "I didn't see the harm in it."

"You gave her your DNA," he muttered, a tinge of something much like concern filtering in his voice.

"I gave her a token," she explained. "Orions traditionally collect souvenirs of physical traits they find unusual in other races. I had friends both at Oxford and at the Academy who did the same. It's not a big deal. Besides, we should count ourselves lucky she didn't fancy one of my eyes," she finished with a smile meant to lighten the atmosphere.

It had the exact opposite effect on him. His jaw set, his lips paling and pressing together angrily, as the look on his face hardened. His fingers curled tighter around his fork, knuckles now white. She stared at him questioningly but he said nothing.

"How is the food?" she asked to change the subject.

He dumped his fork onto his plate, his gaze still laser-focused on her face. "Revolting, but fresh. It tastes like some sort of meat so you should eat it. You need the protein." Every one of his words was carefully-measured, voice even deeper than usual.

It wasn't exactly a ringing endorsement, but her stomach was cramping with hunger, so she stabbed at a piece of that gummy would-be stew and shoveled it into her mouth. She had to cover her lips with her hand to prevent herself from spitting it out. He was right: it was revolting.

# # #

Carol was one wall away, even closer than on the ship. The wall separating them was certainly flimsier than the vessel's thick metal bulkhead. He could tear this one down with a fist. If he concentrated, he could hear her breathing through the cracking and crinkling of the frail structure they were in. She was a beautiful woman. It wasn't that Khan had not noticed before. He had first noted it, when he had caught a glimpse of the picture the admiral had of her on his desk in the Section 31 London base. It had not meant anything. It had been merely an observation in the same vein that he remarked that the sky earthen sky was still blue. But now after weeks in the cramped quarters of a crippled, alien ship, the details of her beauty emerged clearer than ever: the elegant slope of her swan-like neck, her marmoreal skin, her golden hair and her heterochromatic eyes.

He carefully kept his thoughts from straying from physical traits and into the realm of the gratuitous kindness she had shown him and which he could not rationalize away, her intelligence, remarkable for a mere human, that allowed her to easily navigate her knowledge of applied physics and think quickly under pressure, and above all, her tenacity. She had been ever so determined to present him a brave facade. She persevered in defying the limits of her all too human body to be on the bridge and stumble through the unequal battle they had fought and won against the Badlands.

She reminded him of someone attempting to climb a rocky mountain without proper equipment: crawling up, cutting herself, bleeding and almost suffocating at times, yet never giving up. Khan had seen worse than the Badlands, but Carol had grown up free in a peaceful and prosperous world without inequities and injustices. She had never been to war and as far as he could tell, until her father's betrayal, she had been reasonably able to trust the people in her life. Being trapped with someone she was wary of on an extremely dangerous journey had to have been nerve-wrecking, but she had displayed no outward sign of stress, her focus seeming entirely on reaching their destination.

Physical attraction he could keep under control. Others of his kind had been less inclined so, but he did not see the point of superior ability if one did not use it to maintain an iron grip on one's impulses. He held order in high regard and considered the lack thereof an attribute of the weak. But now lying in bed in a Cardassian hotel, unable to sleep, the woman next door haunted him, the edge of his desire sharpened by her suicidal insistence on going against Section 31 on her own. He wanted her to live almost as much as he had once wanted her father to die.

He slid off his bed and pulled on his trousers and shirt, then went to knock on her door.

"Who is it?" Carol asked in Standard in a voice thick with sleep.

"Carol, it's me," he responded in English.

He counted up to a minute, until she opened the door. She was wearing only that electric blue slip she had seen her in before.

"Is something wrong?" she asked, a note of worry trembling in her tone.

He came in uninvited, his body almost brushing against hers, as he crossed the threshold. She commanded the door shut in his cue. He shook his head 'no' at her question. She looked at him in puzzlement. He walked into her personal space without a word and gently brushed a few stray hairs from her face, the pads of his fingers skidding across her silken skin. The heat of her body seeped into his. He leaned over and ran his lips over the side of her neck in a slow, careful caress. His hands came to rest on her lower back, pressing into the satiny material of her night-gown, pulling her flush against him. He hadn't been this close with somebody in this manner since before the war, since before tactics and increasingly higher chances of defeat had taken over his every waking thought.

She smelled piquantly of alien soap and was so warm and pliant in his arms. For a while he just held her, trailing his right index finger up and down the length of her spine. Then he realized that something was off. She was not pushing him away or saying no, but but she stood too still against him, her arms by her side, not returning his embrace. The way her heart was racing was open to interpretation so he needed to see her face to properly gauge her mood. He let her go instantly and lifted her head with a light grip on her chin. Her eyes were swimming with tears. There was no fear in them, but then she went to great lengths to never show him any.

Horror struck immediately, catching him wrong-footed. He had never claimed to be the paragon of morality, but he had never forced anyone into his bed, either. However, she had no way of knowing what lines he would not cross. Had she let him touch her, because she was all too aware of her inability to fight him off? It came into direct contradiction with everything he knew about her, but then she had been pushed to the brink one time too often lately so it was conceivable that something inside had snapped at some point.

He slowly backed away from her. "I'm sorry," he said mechanically. "That was presumptuous of me."

And with that he left. Back in his room, he started pacing up and down, his feet scrubbing against the bristly rug. Guilt was a rare and entirely unwelcome occurrence for him. On the other side of the wall, Carol was sobbing loudly.

TBC


	13. Chapter 13

A/N: if you read it, please tell me what you think, whether good or bad.

The breakfast the next day was one of the most tense affairs he had been a part of and that was saying something. Carol came down shortly after he did. She was deadly pale, her eyes blood-shot and shadowed. Otherwise she looked impeccable, dressed in the long, dark violet robe-like outfit of the day before, her hair combed to perfection. She suffered through their Standard-speaking waitress enthusiastic endorsement of warm fish juice, before they politely declined the offer and asked for whatever food they had on the menu, which included and was limited to something called Larish pie and dried fish. The latter was extremely salty, but the pie was a considerable improvement over the odd stew from dinner.

They ate in stony silence for a few unbearably long minutes, until she dropped the piece of pie she was nibbling on her plate and looked up at him with bleary, uncertain eyes. "About last night," she began.

Khan tensed and opened his mouth to explain himself or maybe apologize again, but she shook her head no. He said nothing then and sat back in his chair, waiting.

"I wanted to," she murmured hurriedly. Some of his disbelief might have shown on his face, because she rushed to add: "I did! But I can't. No matter what happened before that, at the end of the day, you're still the man who killed my father and crashed the largest ship in Starfleet history into downtown San Francisco. Here is where I draw my line."

"I understand," he said firmly, meeting her eyes and nodding to convey that the message had been received.

She licked her lips nervously and nodded as well. "I'll go see if they don't have some more of that tea from yesterday."

She staggered away in a hurry, leaving him to mull over this new equilibrium between them. Strategically thinking, this new development put him at a disadvantage. He had a weakness where she was concerned and hence lacked the objectivity to gauge just how much of that weakness was a shared one. But any calculations, no matter how necessary or logical, were swept away by the warmth blooming in the left side of his chest, just under his ribs. It evoked the sense memory of having her pressed against his body. Contact. He hadn't touched anyone without violent intent since he had hugged his family members goodbye, before watching them go into their cryotubes. There was relief mixed in the warmth and the combination was overpowering, threatening the grip he had on his emotions.

He applied himself to the task of finishing his pie, masking his inner turmoil with the mundane gestures. The food tasted ashen in his mouth, as unwanted images bombarded his mind. In the bright light of day his desire was no longer sexual or perhaps it had never been. Not entirely. The longing ate like acid at the warmth of being wanted back, opening a cavernous hole within himself that felt almost physical. It was as though he only now became aware of how long it had truly been since he had spoken with someone without pretense and threats, since he had experienced even the illusion of safety, since he had lain eyes on his family without the terror of seeing them dead the next day. He had never before been separated from them. They had grown up together, revolted against their makers together, conquered a quarter of a planet together, gone to war and gone to space together. But now he had spent the three years since awakening to a strange and hostile world without them and he had thought he had lost them twice over.

The absence burnt, almost as much as the loneliness, an unshakable ache that grew every day and that sometimes lapsed into bitterness and last night had bled into the insane gesture of seeking out Carol Marcus of all people. Nobody in the universe had more reasons than her to hate him and to no one was he more indebted. He had no right to wish for more, but during the weeks of them working together against the unyielding force of cosmos, the loneliness and the anguish over his crew still being in the hands of the enemy had if not diminished then definitely become easier to bear. It had felt as though for the first time in three years he had a companion. It was perhaps an illusion, a potentially dangerous one, but she had seemed as isolated as him, like they were in this together.

He realized with a start that he was clutching the fork with enough force to bend the metal so he forced his fingers to relax. Carol's return with the tea nearly startled him. She looked at him from the corners of her eyes, a slight frown marring her face. He gave her no explanation, merely took his own steaming mug from her with a brief thanks. Once seated, Carol stared into her cup as though it contained the secrets of the world. She took one cautious sip before speaking again.

"We have been stranded on that ship for weeks, under a lot of stress and depending on each other to survive. Regardless of our past, it's not out of the realm of possibility that we both needed an outlet... a way to release the accumulating tension, once the worst of it was over."

It sounded rehearsed, as if she had been preparing this speech for a while, and he wondered if she was attempting to convince him or herself. "An outlet? Carol, tell yourself whatever you need, but you don't have to persuade me. I know what I want."

She slammed her mug down on the table, a few blotches of red liquid spilling over the rim. Some of the aliens at the nearby tables turned their heads in their direction and Carol waited for the commotion to die down, before talking again. It gave Khan just enough time to realize how cold his last words had sounded.

"Why did you do it to begin with?" she hissed at him leaning forward as she spoke. "Was it a form of protracted revenge against my father?"

"No, absolutely not! Last night had nothing to do with anyone else but you and me," he said in a low, determined tone of voice. "Is it so hard to believe that I could like you?" He let his gaze rove over her face, taking in its beauty, unblemished by the sleepless night. "That I respect you? That I want you?"

She swallowed audibly and looked away from him and out the window by which they were seated. He took a few gulps of his tea waiting for her to reply, but it soon became clear that she wouldn't. Or maybe she could not.

There was something else gnawing at him. "Carol, if I hadn't stopped last night, what would have happened?"

A muscle jumped in her jaw and she wiped her head in his direction dizzyingly fast. Her eyes were dry but burning as though with fever. She looked down at the food spread on the table and then at him again. "I think we both know the answer to that."

His fists clenched and he felt an unfamiliar stab of self-doubt, as the urge to inflict violence rose within him. His gut clenched, fury a searing blaze as it lit up every nerve in his body. She stared at his furled hands before reaching over in an attempt to grasp at them, but he drew back, straightening himself up and as far away from her as possible in their current location. Her touch was a scarlet letter he did not want on his skin.

"If it is an instrument of self-harm you want, I can provide one that is far less intimate, as I'm certain you remember."

She looked as if he had just slapped her, anger infusing the hurt in her glare. "After everything you've done for your family, you of all people should understand... ." Her lower lip was trembling and he could not tell if it was from anguish or rage. "What kind of person feels this way about...? Just for one night I didn't want the choice, the moral responsibility... . I... I should have... . I don't know anymore. Everything is wrong."

"And how do you imagine it would have been the morning after?"

She drummed her fingers against the scratched metallic surface beneath them. "I didn't care. I didn't want to think... of anything."

"Didn't you?" he drawled. "Weren't you perhaps in some dark corner of your mind you refuse to acknowledge trying to punish yourself for your attraction to me? Your heart was racing, Carol. Was it because you were afraid I was going to hurt you?"

She sucked in a shuddery breath. "You've already hurt me," she dully.

He inclined his head in her direction. "True, but despite that ,you should know that I would never force you or otherwise coerce you into sleeping with me." He stood up. "As far as I am concerned, last night was an isolated incident, a lapse in judgment on the part of us both. It won't be repeated."

He turned on a heel without waiting for her response and walked out at a brisk pace.

# # #

Carol was on the bridge of the Denobulan ship, nursing a cup of replicated coffee that had gone cold. The repairs were completed. After Khan had failed to return to the inn, she had left and gone to check upon their vessel. The Cardassian engineer had finished by then and had been all too eager to explain his work, peppering his monologue with nervous inquiries about her hooded companion. The patch-up was crude by comparison with what they could have gotten within Federation borders, but the ship was fully functional again, which was what mattered.

She had given the Cardassian the promised medical supplies and he had been all too glad to disappear from her sight immediately. That had been two hours ago. Khan had yet to turn up. She wasn't worried, though, not for him, anyway. The colony was another matter entirely. As she waited, her mind kept turning in agonized circles. She felt depleted, the night before and the morning following having drained her all of her energy. Snatches of conflicting memories pushed at her boundaries. The careful way in which he had held her the night before, like she was precious, stood in painful contrast with his breaking her leg to get to her father. She remembered acutely the sensation of his hand running up and down her back, the feathery kisses pressed into her neck, the concern in his eyes when she had given the Orion female that lock of hair, the wounded look on his face upon realizing she wasn't responding to his caresses and the burning hatred in his gaze as he had pressed his fingers into her father's skull.

She had expected something different, when he had reached for her back in her room at the inn. Brutality and for him to push her into the bed and take what he wanted without any consideration for her. The tears had come flowing the instant she had realized she yearned to put her arms around him and lose herself in the strength of his embrace. His words at breakfast had made a dent in her rationalizing of what had gone between them. Had she indeed intended to use him as means of punishing herself or was the truth even worse than she cared to admit? Physical attraction could be justified by the simple, objective fact that Khan was handsome. He also projected an intense and confident kind of charisma that rendered him magnetic.

But that wasn't what disturbed her now. That made sense, that was all only a matter of pheromones. For a few insane seconds last night, all she had wanted had been a human touch and comfort. And she had it specifically from him.

TBC


	14. Chapter 14

A/N: if you read it, please tell me what you think, whether good or bad.

# # #

Khan had deigned it fit to appear five hours later, as cool and collected as ever, while Carol felt anything but. For some irrational reason his composure infuriated her. He managed to pour gasoline over the fire by calmly asking if they were ready to leave.

"We are, if you are done with your stroll around the neighborhood," she replied caustically.

He tilted his head to the side, a bemused expression crossing his features. "Do I take it that I have been missed?"

She didn't think. She just flung her half-drunken mug of coffee at his head. He ducked and the cup shattered itself against the bulkhead.

"Are you feeling better?" he asked loftily.

She scoffed. "I would've felt better, if I hadn't missed."

He gave her a smile that was almost impish. "Would you like to try again?"

"No, I think I'm done... for now."

"Something to live for then," he remarked.

Carol rolled her eyes and jumped into the command console seat before he could. She arched an eye-brow at him, when he gave her a pointed looked, and began lifting-off procedures. Left with nothing else to do safe bodily removing her from the chair, he sat in the place of the co-pilot. Minutes later, they maneuvered their way up into the atmosphere and far away from the planet. They had to cut through the Badlands to avoid spending longer than necessary in Federation space. With experience and a fully operational vessel, the could do so faster and more efficient than the first time around. For a while they navigated in silence, falling into the familiar rhythm of a team work that had been startlingly easy to establish.

"Could we transfer helm to stand-by for a while?" she asked. "I want to show you something."

He agreed and she strolled to the charts at the back of the bridge. "Have you heard of the Xindi?" she inquired once he followed her there.

"An alien alliance currently bordering the Federation but negotiating for entrance. You've had unfortunate entanglements with them in the last century."

She smiled slightly. "Well informed as usual." She tapped her right index finger against the location of the Azati star system. "In the 22nd century Azati Prime housed a weapons base, but it's now occupied by civilian installations and Xindi-Aquatics cities. However, a planetoid on the edge of the system is being used as junkyard for ships with outdated technology. I know it's quite a detour from our route to Talos III, but at least, it's through territory Section 31 can't have access to. And the security around abandoned ships is bound to be light, if there is any to begin with."

"You think I could find a ship there for me and my people."

"Well, you won't be fitting seventy-two cryotubes on this one, not without a cargo bay. These ships would be out of commission so their technology is going to be decades or even a century behind the one currently being used by the Xindi, but they are more advanced than most Federation members and they do build to last."

He nodded, looking thoughtful, as he looked over the distance from their location to the Azati system.

"This ship used to belong to the Denobulan doctor on the Enterprise that made first contact with the Xindi so you should find a lot of information on their 22nd century tech in its databases," she continued. "Since we now have full power, I can take care of the brunt of piloting the ship, while you learn what you need."

"Thank you, Carol. Would you mind if I started right after we plot a course for the Azati system?"

She assured him it was fine. "Aren't you going to ask why I didn't tell you all this sooner?"

He gave a speculative glance. "No, I am not!"

# # #

"Insectoid and Reptilian ships? You'd prioritize the most bellicose of the Xindi species," she observed glancing over his shoulder at the Denobulan-style pad he was studying. She backtracked to the unoccupied seat on the bridge and made herself comfortable, balancing her plate of Risian sea food on her lap.

"You seem to know quite a lot about Xindi," he noted.

She shrugged biting into a fried Risian sepia. "I had a Xindi-Arboreal classmate at Oxford," she explained once she had chewed and swallowed her mouthful. "He was very friendly and eager to talk about his people. He later caused a quite a scandal when he ran off with our Andorian professor of quantum temporal mechanics, ending up entangled in the complexities of Andorian familiar relationships. It almost dissolved into an interstellar incident."

He set his pad on the console in front of him. "Are there a lot of aliens studying at Terran universities?"

"Yes, especially in the last few decades. Anyone can apply, regardless of their planet of origin and some of our universities have formed consortiums with similar institutions outside the Sol system. For instance, I hold a double doctorate from Oxford and the Archer University in New Samarkand on Alpha Centauri III."

He was staring straight at her, an unfamiliar intensity in his kaleidoscopic eyes. Something surged to the forefront of her mind and she chuckled. "Oh, that's right. You occupied the old Samarkand."

He smiled indulgently, not tearing his gaze from her. "Not for long."

The spell was broken a second later when the burst of static form the sensors alerted them that they were entering the Azati system. Their journey through Xindi space had been uneventful. While Starfleet needed permission from the Xindi Council to breach their territory, the excellent relations between the Federation and their neighbors made regular ships belonging to the members a common sight in this area of space so nobody had bothered them along the way.

They slowed down to impulse, as they slipped inside the star system and carefully slithered to the moon where the ship junkyard was located. The red giant cast incandescent burgundy and magenta rays, silhouetting the four planets and their satellites both natural and artificial against the darkness of space. Among them stood the turquoise shape of Azati Prime sprinkled with the white of vapor clouds.

"It's beautiful," she murmured.

The ship gave an abrupt jerk, distracting her. "Is there something the matter?" she asked pouring over the instruments.

"No," he shot back. "I merely increased speed. We're pressed for time."

She stole one last glance at the Xindi-Aquatic jewel in the distance before returning her attention to her console and to maneuvering their vessel into position above their intended destination. She had never been in Xindi space before, but she had heard many good things about Azati Prime that had come a long way since Archer's historical mission the previous century. The Xindi military had withdrawn from the system and the Aquatics had apparently built modern and sleek underwater cities that were not only very prosperous but quickly becoming a tourist attraction renown in the entire section.

Carol felt a pang at the thought that had she entered the Azati system on the Enterprise, she could have visited both Prime and the other local Xindi colony and immersed herself into the culture of a most unique civilization, with which her own world had a fascinating history. She shoved the regret into a corner of her mind best reserved for lost causes and concentrated on the task at hand, even as her fingers were numb while activating the commands of her console.

Their ship was just beginning its descent, when the sensors demanded her focus again. "Wait," she cautioned. "I'm getting a strange reading off the surface of the planetoid... . Hold... . Life signs!"

"Xindi?" he inquired.

"No. This celestial body's atmosphere is too rich in fluorite for any of the Xindi species and there is no other habitat structure down there except for the abandoned ships."

"Could it be an animal?"

"A large one at that. Many planets devoid of sentient life forms do have non sentient ones, some of them predatory. We'll have to be careful." She straightened herself up and looked at him. He was scowling, hovering protectively over his console. "Seen anything you like?" she asked.

"I have," he said looking thoughtful and pulled the imagine of the ship he wanted on the view screen. It was a threefold 22nd century Insectoid ship with a blue-gray hull.

"Are you sure you want an Insectoid one? This one reads as fully-functional, but it doesn't even have a bridge."

He rotated the view of the ship sideways. "This is precisely why I chose it. Its command processes are distributed throughout so I can route them to a central unit and fly it on my own. Any of the other ships would have required a full crew compliment."

Her eyes darted from the Xindi vessel on the screen to his impassive, sculptured profile. "May I ask you something?"

"It depends on the question," he said without missing a beat.

"How long did it take you to learn about Starfleet ships?"

"Several hours," he responded casually. He expertly landed their vessel on the side of the Xindi ship he had set his sights on. "I have an eidetic memory and an estimated IQ of 380. I also might have slightly exaggerated, when I told Kirk and Spock that your father wanted to exploit my savagery and not my intellect."

She got out of her chair in order to follow him off the bridge. "Too bad there isn't a gene for modesty," she quipped as she caught up with him.

He didn't reply to her barb, only lifted a querying eyebrow when they reached the tiny decontamination chamber attached to the medical bay. She went in first. "I wouldn't miss the opportunity to see inside a historical Xindi ship for anything in this world," she said as she keyed the the room sealed and switched environmental controls to negative pressure, once he stepped inside as well.

"Alright," he acquiesced reaching for one of the nearby space suits.

# # #

The Insectoid Xindi ship closely resembled a hive, a darkened, cavernous one with narrow corridors and arched opened area filled with inert equipment. The vessel seemed to have been retired rather than decommissioned, as her tricorder was informing her that its fuel reserves were intact and the warp core was ready for flight. Carol had to give it to him: he couldn't have made a better choice. She was currently inspecting something familiar to her: the weapons systems. The torpedoes had been removed, but the particle cannons and the shields still worked. She was alone, after they had parked the Denobulan vessel in the Insectoid one's roomy shuttle bay, and Khan had gone to test his theory of rerouting operational command to a central processor.

The atmosphere aboard had been calibrated for Xindi Insectoids, but it had the option of being switched to something humanoids would tolerate so they had had no problem in making themselves at home. She was looking into turning the shields on, when she heard a noise behind her. She pivoted around, drawing her phaser. It was the only weapon she and Khan had and he had seen her take it along, but he hadn't objected nor had he asked for it.

The phaser flew from her hands before she had had an opportunity to properly aim it, pain exploding up her arm. What had hit her was a vigorous, scale-covered tail of a large quadruped that wasted no time in putting her on her back, giant paws pressing onto her chest, restricting her breathing. A set of four, oval orange eyes stared her down from above gleaming fangs. A thunderous roar broke shattered the silence of the empty ship. Panic licked at her consciousness, as her arms flailed, padding at the floor in search of her dropped phaser.

Then the beast was gone. Khan had grabbed it by the mix of fur and scales on its nape with an inhuman growl of his own. She recognized the savage determination etched into the lines of the augment's face. In that moment Khan had more in common with the wild animal he was engaged in combat with than with her. The muscles in his arms bulged, the laser focus in his gaze burning with malevolent fury. Paralysis locked her limbs, even as in the back of her mind, she knew she should grab her phaser and help him in the fight with the creature that had attacked her. Before she could react, however, a loud crack reverberated in her ears.

Everything shifted. The sandy brown light became a blue hallo. The walls changed shape. Pain sparked in her leg. The pain of shattered bone, chips of it cutting into her muscle. Her father... . She had seen his skull break open under Khan's fingers, blood splattering against the floor. The augment had wiped his stained hands on her father's uniform. Revulsion and despair overcame her, as her heart was beating out of her chest. The same blood-stained hands had been on her, caressing, searching for skin underneath her clothes.

She screamed in horror, as Khan advanced on her. Her stomach was roiling and her cheeks were wet. She tried to draw back, but the bulkhead was blocking her escape. She wanted to stand and run, but the pain in her left leg was now excruciating. Her head was spinning.

"No... please," she begged, appalled at how pathetic she sounded.

Khan was calling her name, cajoling, asking if she was hurt. He crouched in front of her and extended his arm to touch her leg. She remembered the phaser by her side, took it and trained it on him. "Get away from me or I'll kill you," she warned.

He held up his palms, which were oddly enough clean of blood. "Carol, listen to me," he besought. "You are safe. You are no longer on the Vengeance."

"I said: get away from me!"

He did not budge. "Alright, but first tell me: are you in any kind of pain?"

"My leg," she rasped, her vision growing increasingly blurry. She was crying again. Crying and holding a weapon with a trembling hand.

Her surroundings were fawn-colored once more, the lightening bleary and alien. She relaxed her grip on the phaser and chanced a look at its settings. It was on kill. Awkwardly trying to straighten herself up, she slowly put the weapon down. Through it all Khan had not moved from its range, his eyes filled with concern as he looked her over. Behind him the alien wild life form lay on the floor, its neck twisted at an unnatural angle. Whatever that thing had for a spine, Khan had snapped it clean and saved her from being torn to shreds.

TBC


	15. Chapter 15

A/N: if you read it, please tell me what you think, whether good or bad.

# # #

There was no other sound besides Carol's stuttering heartbeat in the tomb-like silence of the abandoned alien ship. It reverberated against empty walls and dilapidated equipment rolling in his ears like the forgotten sound of the ocean. If felt as though they were both buried alive in the dead vessel. She was so pale, her skin looked livid. Her lips were white and her eyes widened in stark terror. Tears still glistened on her emaciated cheeks. It dawned on him that, while he had recovered and thrived in the past few weeks, she had lost weight, tress and worry taking their toll on her. Right now there was nothing of the vibrant, courageous woman who had earlier teased him about his ego left in this pain-ridden shell.

She didn't seem to be physically injured. There were a few cuts on her clothes but no blood anywhere and she wasn't favoring any part of her body other than her left leg. The same he had stepped on in his hurry to get to her father on the bridge of the Vengeance. He had broken more than her bones that day. He had caused a splinter into her spirit that was still bleeding and still hurting. He wondered if she would ever be whole again. She had to be. The alternative stung and chafed against portions of himself that so far had only housed thoughts of his family, so removed from him now, always in danger, slipping though his fingers the second he had felt confident they were safe.

The realization of how deeply embedded within him Alexander Marcus' daughter had become angered him, but the fury had none of the violent fire he was used to. Instead it stoked another feeling he was experiencing: one much less familiar, but no less vicious. This one was not an all-consuming blaze, but a slow-burning flame that singed rather than scorched. Guilt, which he was feeling for the second time in the space of a week, a frequency without precedent in his entire life. It fed into the stab of regret of he had felt at first glimpse of a destroyed downtown San Francisco after the crash of the Vengeance.

Guilt dwindled along the ever-present concern for his family, his center, his link to a mad, senseless universe dead-set against him. His only constant in the game of marked cards that had been his life. Since crushing Heisen's skull with is bare hands, he had killed repeatedly to protect himself and his family, sent people to their deaths in his quest to bring order and unity to a confused humanity ravaged by wars and cruelty and killed again directly during their escape from a burning city in the aftermath of a lost fight. He had killed to avenge his family in Carol's century and sought to kill himself, unable to stand the idea of being alone without his loved ones, the last of family and the last of his kind.

He refused to feel sorry for any of those times, yet the guilt would not be subdued, festering like the seed of rot corrupting a fresh apple. Carol's pain and fear accused him, even as her angry words resounded in his memory:_ murderer, monster_... . It was true. He was a monster, an exiled prince three hundred years out of his time, his very existence an abhorrence to the laws of nature in every conceivable way. And he was a murderer, perhaps not quite a genocidal madman, but a murderer, nevertheless. A bottomless chasm opened between them at that very moment and he saw with absolute clarity what they were: victim and perpetrator. In that instant he was absurdly grateful that they had not spent the night together back on the Cardassian colony, because it would have been yet another transgression against her, laying his blood-stained hands on someone he had wronged so egregiously.

The Starfleet-issued phaser seemed to materialize out of thin air in front of his eyes. The lapse in concentration was one of the worst he had ever had. But Carol was holding the weapon out to him by its muzzle.

"Take it," she wheezed. "It's not safe for me to have it with you around. The setting... it's on kill. I always have my phaser on stun and I don't know when I changed it."

He took the phaser from her automatically, switched the setting back to stun and shoved in the back of his pants. He unfurled himself and stood stretching a hand out to her. "Can you walk?"

She didn't answer just staggered to her feet on her own, shaking as she did, and wavered immediately. Her breathing accelerated with the effort. He wrapped an arm around her waist to support her and she did lean on him, her head all but resting on his shoulder. She seemed so slight against him and he felt a fresh burst of admiration for this woman who was so physically

unassuming yet so morally and emotionally strong, he could swear he felt the titanium spine in that petite, delicate body.

They moved together through the oppressive bowls of the extraterrestrial ship, his hearing strained to hear the slightest noise alerting to the presence of another predator, but the silence reigned supreme. He returned her to the familiar Denobulan vessel in the cargo bay. She refused to go the infirmary, insisting she wasn't really hurt, so he helped her into the bed in the living quarters then dashed to the medbay to grab the medical tricorder and a dermal regenerator. He knew how to use both as part of 23rd century version of first aid, yet his can revealed that she no more seriously physical injuries than several ecchymoses on her chest and right arm.

He left her with the regenerator and a cup of hot tea and went to attend to another pressing matter. The Xindi ship's entire system converged onto a chamber designed as a hatchery for the offspring of the Insectoid species. The original equipment had been stripped away, but he had managed to transfer all the processes not conducted automatically throughout the ship to a central command core he had established there to employ instead of a bridge. He was utilizing it now to scan the vessel for a third time and for a third time the sensors only found two life signs aboard: himself and Carol. The animal had to have slipped in, when they had maneuvered the Denobulan shuttle in the cargo bay.

His analysis of the Xindi ship had revealed another unexpected surprise: it had an operational water reclamation system that powered in a bath of some sort with a heated basin that also worked. Carol missed washing with actual water. He hesitated, considerations of wasted time and a narrow window of escape weighing heavily on his mind, before the imagine of Carol shuddering under the duvet on the bed, in exile, far away from friends and any safe haven she could count on. Khan sanitized the chamber and and filled the small pool.

# # #

The water felt heavenly against her skin. Yet, despite its temperature, she still felt chilled, as though the cold had seeped deep into her bones, turning the living marrow to ice. Her left leg still hurt and the tension in her back made her muscles cramp painfully. Still the bath felt like a balm on her wrecked the nerves. The room was as eerily quiet as the rest of the ship. Vapors traveled up, licking at the glistening ecru walls. The arched ceiling was covered in a vividly-colored mozaik depicting Insectoids fighting against a winged version of their species.

War. Everywhere she looked nowadays. War was supposed to be over, the Federation peaceful, Starfleet focused on exploring. But she had spent the past two years at odds... even with her own father. The world around her seemed to have turned sharp, hostile, almost biting. She sighed and slid to the edge of the pool, where she had her communicator. She used it to tap into the Xindi vessel's communications system.

"How is the ship?" she asked, once she got through.

"Prepped and ready to fly," came Khan's crisp and clipped reply.

"I'd be right over then."

"There is no need. I can maneuver it by myself." There was a pause. "Carol... I will not pretend I regret killing your father. As far as I'm concerned, he more than deserved it. That will never change, but I am sorry I hurt you... both in body and soul."

A frosty tremor sliced through her and her hand curled harder around the communicator. "I don't want to talk about it."

"I can understand that, but I believe you should."

"You and three different therapists," she snapped. "Nowadays we can grow organs back with just one pill and repair broken bones within minutes, but the mind... the mind is still touch-and-go. Maybe I'll get better, maybe I won't. That's just the reality of it." She closed her eyes. It was strange talking to him like this, strange and vaguely impersonal, but at the same time, easier. Safer somehow. "For a while, after what happened on the Vengeance, I blamed you for everything. If only he hadn't found the Botany Bay, I used to think, he would have never done what he did."

"Necessary evil," he said gruffly, his voice thicker than usual in the tubular room around her. "You never know what you would do for the ones you hold dear, for the things you believe in, until they are threatened. People believe dying for your loved ones is difficult. It's not; it's the easiest, most hopeful thing in the universe. What is difficult is lying, cheating, killing, starting a war or ending one to protect them."

"Necessary?" She smiled bitterly. "And where does necessary end? With a thousand deaths? A million? One destroyed civilization or a hundred?"

"Are you asking how long that particular slippery slope is for myself? For Starfleet? For your father? Or for yourself?"

"Even I'm not that much of an idealist to ask that question right now for anyone else but yourself."

Her statement was initially met with silence and for a while she thought he wouldn't answer, but then he spoke. "You once told me that life without a conscience had to be so much easier. I wouldn't know." He paused and she tensed, bringing the device closer to ear to hear. She had thought she had heard a sob filtered through the static of the ship's rusty communications system. "But there is nothing I would not do for my family," he continued haltingly, his voice sounding strangled. "No matter how hard it would be to live with it in the aftermath. Carol... if you cannot accept anything else, at least, understand that the man who raised you and the man I knew were two entirely different persons."

Carol winced, finally opening her eyes. The water around her had gone lukewarm. "I thought you hated him."

"I do, but I also comprehend him. This is how I knew where to hit him."

Realization dawned. "The attack on the Daystrom Conference Room... it was him you were trying to kill, wasn't it? The others were just collateral damage."

"Him and his eventual accomplices."

She knew what he meant. Lance Cartwright had been there that evening and had been seriously injured in the assault.

"Khan... what you said before about my Dad being two different people. That was... kind of you, but we both know it's not true. His choices, all of them, whether they involved killing eleven people in their sleep or provoking a war with the Klingons, are... were a part of him, of the man who was my father. And this, rather than on what happened on the Vengeance, is what I have to live with."

# # #

Khan set the communicator down by his side. He was sitting on the floor, in the corridor, on the other side of the wall of the bath. He couldn't hear her inside, as the ship's chambers were soundproof, safe for what came through the communicator. Yet he felt her acutely close, their conversation unbearably intimate. He wiped at his eyes, his fingers coming back wet. He had committed a grave miscalculation. He had thought himself immune, just because it had never happened to him in all his years, both awake and in cryosleep. The only love he had ever felt had been familiar devotion and in time he had come to believe that was the true extent of what he could feel.

It wasn't that he had read Carol Marcus wrong. He hadn't. He had seen all the way to her core and now he wished he hadn't. The irony was not lost on him. Alexander Marcus could have had power over him like no other, if only he had introduced him to the daughter he had been so keen on keeping away from his most secret projects.

TBC


	16. Chapter 16

A/N: if you read it, please tell me what you think, whether good or bad.

# # #

_Kati was huddled towards the end of her bed, curled in a fetal position, her skin almost translucent as it stretched pitifully over prominent bones and thinned muscles. She was shivering slightly and her bruised-looking lips opened, but no words came out. A single drop of blood leached from the left corner of her mouth. Khan approached her carefully, his steps heavy and measured. Ling hovered at his side. He didn't need to look at her to know she was terribly worried. They were testing something on Kati, perhaps a new improvement to their already remarkable mental and physical acuities or a new virus or bacteria that pushed against the barriers of their iron health. The tests were not going very well and each time they returned her to the bedrooms, she seemed worse and worse. _

_Khan crouched on the floor, before the bed, letting Ling sit down on the edge of it, within a safe distance from Kati. Ling slowly reached over, trying to touch the shuddering form of their sister, but Kati shook her head no, her eyes now brimming with tears. They were all his brothers and sisters, perhaps not in blood, but most definitely, in spirit. They were also different or at least, that was what Doctor Heisen and their tutors kept telling them, genetically-engineered to lead humanity to peace in a world ravaged by wars. Only that they weren't human. They were better, stronger, more intelligent... .They heard better, could see in the dark and moved faster. _

_Superior ability bred superior ambition, he had once overheard Dr. Heisen tell one of his colleagues. Khan had then begun to suspect that there was an additional purpose to the experiments performed on them safe for the obvious, practical one. They were means of control, a yoke of pain placed on their necks that had become too resilient for their creators' liking._

_The door opened with a hiss. Khan turned his head to see Doctor Heisen on the threshold, flanked by two guards and surrounded by a the hallo of bright, white light spilling from the corridor. Khan was twelve, but in that moment he saw with perfect clarity that one day the tests would stop, his siblings' suffering brought to an end, the hold the humans had on them shattered. On that day they would be free and he would kill Heisen and his associates with his own hands. And before he did, he would look them all in the eye and show them what kind of ambition true superiority spurned. _

There was a touch, a light one, strange yet familiar, breaking through the haze of memory. A woman's voice called to him gently in English... . He startled awake. Carol's face swam into view, a crease of worry marring the pristine skin between her eyebrows. She drew back and straightened herself.

"Your door was open," she said haltingly, looking slightly embarrassed. "I heard you... I heard a noise. You seemed to be having a nightmare."

He sat up, a few errand strands of hair falling into his eyes. "I was having a nightmare," he said distractedly, the memory as acute, as though he had just knelt by Kati's bed. He even recalled the sterile scent of the room. Kati and Ling were asleep in her cryotube, still in the hands of the enemy, but he was coming for them, for what remained of his family, and they were finally to be reunited.

"I thought you might want to know we are on the edge of the Talosian system. I hid us in a nearby asteroid field." She was looking at him from the corners of her eyes. "Are you alright?"

He blinked to adjust his focus and bring it closer to the present. "Yes, I am," he said, combing his fingers through his hair, brushing it out of his eyes.

Carol didn't look convinced. "Do you want a moment?"

He shook his head no and got off his bed, which was more of a narrow, hard slip of metal in a small, concave chamber carved in the bulkhead. Even if the door had been functional, he wouldn't have bothered sealing it. He had slept under less surveillance than without a door on a large ship with only one other inhabitant. Carol was still staring at him, her frown growing disapproving. She said something about him taking bed clothes from the Denobulan vessel, her gaze roving around the empty walls, taking in the empty bench he had lain upon covered only by his coat. Khan shrugged one shoulder. He had never cared much for comfort and had definitely slept on worse so it had been only natural that he had chosen a resting place based on its proximity to the bridge.

Comfort was the farthest thing from him, anyway, as he stood there, looking her over, the desire singing his veins so intense he barely saw straight. It wasn't just her body he yearned for. He wanted the companionship and to have someone look at him the same way Ling had looked at Joaquin on the day of their wedding. He wanted to have someone. He wanted her. There had been a time when he had dared take what he wanted either ruthlessly or by cajoling and seducing. If he wanted her on those terms, he knew just the words for it: he could play on her guilt and confusion over her father's deeds, manipulate her emotional vulnerability and sense of isolation and appeal to her badly-concealed physical attraction to him. But he didn't want her under false pretense. He wanted the woman who had rescued her father's assassin from what she though was unfair treatment, the woman who had stood up to him with nothing and no one to back her up, the one before him now looking at him with her eyes warm with concern.

She was asking him about his nightmare again and if he was really alright, the words sweet on her tongue, like a honey he longed to taste.

"I was dreaming of my family," he told her truthfully. "Of an experiment performed on one of my sisters under Heisen's purview."

There was not an ounce of insincerity in the compassion coloring her expression. Her lips parted to say something, but he pressed his right index finger on her mouth. "You asked," he said, his gaze stroking over the dark curve of her eye-brow, the tanzanite blue of her right eye and the hazel of her left, down the soft fullness of her cheeks and all the way to her pale pink lips. Her proximity was intoxicating. "It's enough," he added.

"Sometimes, when you look at me this way, I think you're trying to hypnotize me," she murmured, her inner conflict seeping into her voice, the second his finger fell off from her mouth.

"It's the heterochromia," he replied. "Something you should be intimately familiar with." He leaned to whisper in her ear, letting her scent invade his nostrils and wash over him. "Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that in here that still remains indifferent."

She leaned closer as well, her warm cheek touching his, but her whispered words were measured and cold, cutting through him like a blade of ice. "And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body?"

He drew back and took in the sudden stern expression plastered on her face.

"I've done some reading, since you so kindly informed us that no ship should go down without its captain," she grumbled, her frown relaxed, her features smoothed by frosty aloofness. "Whatever you do... don't try to romance me. No fancy quotes from Moby Dick, no tentative gestures... ." She stepped back. Her fingers were trembling slightly, as they undid the clasps on her blouse. "Just come as you really are!"

He didn't allow his gaze to stray from her lovely face and to the patch of skin revealed by the parting folds of material. Unseeing he reached and grasped her wrists, stalling her hands. "This is me. The same book, the same person." He released her. "If you want this, then do it because you wish to, not as means to inflict further punishment onto yourself."

"What I want?" she cried out, grabbing onto the top folds of her blouse one-handed and holding them tightly together. "What I want is for my leg to stop hurting, when there is nothing wrong with it anymore. What I want is to go to bed without the fear of nightmares every night. What I want is for none of this to have happened. What I want is not have felt satisfaction, when I saw you in the hands of the butchers Section 31 calls doctors... . What I want is to have never understood why you did what you did."

"Come, sit down," he said gesturing towards the bench he used as a bed.

She shakily did her buttons back up before nodding. She sat on the metal surface, staring uncertainly at her hands stapled on her lap. He took a seat next to her and pulled his coat to cover her quivering shoulders then wrapped an arm around them, his fingers pressing gently into her right one.

"What you want is for the world to be black and white instead of gray," he stated after a few moments of silence.

She rested her heard on his shoulder. "Your world is black and white. All you want is your family."

"And the one thing I can never have."

Carol lifted her head to look at him with hooded eyes. "How would it have been then... when you were a prince with power over millions?"

He rested his free hand on her cheek. "With you... the same."

"How was it... with the others?"

His hand drifted lower, caressing the side of her neck, his thumb carefully pressing against her jugular. Her pulse, the living beat of her blood, vibrated against his skin, the sensation made all the more decadent by her willingness to allow his hand on her throat in that manner. The symbolism, whether intended on her part or not, was not lost on him.

"I don't know what you've read, but I didn't have a harem. Those four years I was in power only seemed peaceful. Beneath the surface tension was brewing, if not within my borders then outside them. There was an assassin or a spy on every corner. When they weren't spies or assassins, they wanted something from me, even if that something was a night with an augment. The only people I could truly trust, the only ones I could confide in was my family. It was thanks to them that I didn't become a paranoid, genocidal maniac like my neighbors."

Her arms came to furl themselves timidly around his torso. "You asked me what I want? I want to feel something besides pain, anger and doubt if only for a while." His eyes slid closed and she pressed her forehead to his chest. "I don't know if this is the answer you were searching for, but it is the truth."

His hand moved to her nape, grabbing a fistful of her hair and using his grip to lift her head. A tiny gasps fell off her parting lips. He covered her mouth with his in hard, demanding kiss. She kissed him back with equal fervor, her teeth digging into his lower lip along the way. He leaned back on the metal bench, taking her with him. She broke the kiss a second later to gaze at him with blown pupils.

"Close your eyes," she whispered thickly.

He did only to feel her lips on his forehead, his temples, his eyelids... . He shivered, distantly recalling an old Slavic superstition that a kiss on the eyelids predicted a separation. He became keenly aware that this first time might as well be their last. He squeezed her harder to his body, wishing he could have the memory forever imprinted into his skin. It was as though she was seeping into his very pores, her warmth coiling inside of him, taking root into portions of his soul that he had always thought to be dry, infertile land. Her hands slipped under his shirt, slow and gentle as they explored. He smiled, as her mouth found his again. She had come into his arms to forget her suffering and he was discovering that his was washed away in hers.

The proximity alert blared, impossibly loud in his sensitive ears. His eyes snapped open and instead of letting her go, he hugged her tighter, the urge to defend and protect overwhelming.

# # #

Carol had placed the ship in a well-chosen strategical spot: nestled among asteroids, with a gas cloud obscuring the most visible side. No Starfleet ship had the sensors to read through that, but those of the ancient Xindi vessel had been built to scan through the spacial distortions of an expanse created by inter-dimensional beings so their accuracy was not affected. Khan stared at the little view-screen on the make-shift bridge. The configuration of the two ships hovering on the edge of the Talosian system was unmistakable: one Constitution-class that was all too familiar and another one, a Miranda-class vessel.

TBC


	17. Chapter 17

A/N: side-effects of this fanfic include desire to watch and discuss Star Trek. Proceed with caution! :)

# # #

Jim slipped quietly in the medbay intent on finding out whether the bar was opened yet. Fortunately, it was and the first patrons were already there, Scotty, Uhura and Bones sitting around the doctor's desk out back, glasses of Saurian brandy in front of them. The doctor was the only one who made eye contact. Uhura and Scotty were staring at their drinks as though they contained the answers to all the secrets of the universe. Uhura looked particularly stricken and Jim knew why. In the months since Carol had been assigned to the Enterprise, she and the communications officer had become quite good friends.

"Where's Spock?" the captain asked, grabbing the empty tumbler Bones had undoubtedly put out especially for him and filling it with a generous serving of alcohol. "I know he doesn't drink, but we can always replicate some chocolate for him."

It was Uhura who answered. "Plausible deniability. He doesn't want to have to lie about Scotty's brewery or Bones' stash."

Jim gulped on his drink before sitting down with them. "Bones' stash? You're the one who's brought Romulan ale on board."

"He thinks it's yours and I'm covering for you," Uhura said looking directly at him.

Scotty choked on his sip of brandy. "Wait, he actually believes that?"

Uhura shrugged. "Which is more likely: that I sneaked contraband alcohol aboard the flagship or that Jim did?"

Bones chuckled, giving Jim a pointed look, before both he and Scotty raised their glasses in a mock toast to the captain, who only snorted. Their familiar banter lacked its usual good-humored heat. The circumstances were too dire for that. Jim finished his first drink then poured himself a second.

"What did she say?" Uhura finally asked, voice dry and gravely.

They looked at him then, each and every one of them, Scotty with hope in his eyes, Bones with resignation, Uhura with trepidation.

"She insists she did it," Jim muttered in the oppressive silence of Bones' tiny office at the back of the medbay. "All the evidence supports it. But I can't believe that the woman who stood on the bridge of the Enterprise and told her father and head of Starfleet that if he wants to destroy a ship full of innocent people, he'd have to do it with her on board, would kill seventy-three people in cold blood."

Scotty reached for Uhura's flask of Romulan ale. "I wasn't on our silver lady, when Marcus fired on the Enterprise, but I was on the bridge of the Vengeance, when he killed her father." He paused, the sound of the glistening blue liquid as it gurgled from the bottle the only one in the room. "He crushed his head right in front of her. I'll never forget her scream, the look on her face... . I don't condone what she did, but I understand why she snapped."

"And snapped she did," Bones commented in a low voice that made his Georgian drawl all the more pronounced. "She can wave her right to confidentiality and have her medical records unsealed. I'll testify on her behalf and so will M'Benga. She'll get lenience."

"I'll tell ya one thing," Scotty mumbled. "That's not the only reason they'll go easy on her. Nobody will mourn that bastard. He got what was comin' to him."

Jim slammed his glass down on the table. "She didn't do it." He stabbed his finger to Scotty. "She's not capable of it!"

"Jim," Uhura started, tears trembling at the corners of her eyes. "Neither of us knows for certain what we would have done in her shoes." She looked away, swallowing hard, her expression haunted. "You said it yourself: our first instinct is to seek revenge when those we love are taken from us. You almost killed Khan yourself once. And so did Spock... and before I found out we needed his blood to revive you, I didn't spare a single thought to stopping him."

Jim grabbed for the Romulan ale himself. "She didn't do it," he repeated quietly. "Maybe... maybe she would've killed Khan, but all of them?" He mixed a hefty portion of the strong spirits with the rest of his brandy. It wasn't wise, but nobody was stopping him and he most certainly wasn't stopping himself from getting absolutely plastered so he could silence at the least the voice of one of his warring instincts.

"But Jim," Bones interjected. "If she didn't kill them, then what the hell happened?"

# # #

_Thirty-six hours earlier_

Normally Carol was good at compartmentalizing, but as she stared at the USS Enterprise and the brand new USS Reliant on the Xindi ship's narrow view-screen, the recent rapid succession of events gave her more than a bit of whiplash. Truth be told, she was rattled. The fresh spike of adrenaline washed away the warmth of the intimacy she and Khan had just shared. It had gone far beyond the physical. She had almost thought she had caught a glimpse of vulnerability in his face after the first time they had kissed and it had ignited a spark of tenderness within her. In that instant it had become about more than a few fleeting moments of comfort. This formidable man opening himself to her in that way tugged at strings of her heart she did not want accessible to Khan Noonien Singh of all people. It occurred to her that their connection, whether real or a byproduct of the strain of the past few weeks, was one of pain, their mutual troubled past both standing between them and biding them together.

"They are here."

His haunted words shifted her focus back to him and the present.

"The Reliant and the Enterprise? Yes, I can see that," she said, watching the two ships drift past the asteroid field, to which they had no reason to pay attention, and into the Talosian system. The latter had five planets orbiting its binary stars and only the forth of them was off limits to Starfleet.

"No," Khan contradicted, looking at her with burning eyes. "My family... they are really here. Whatever excuse Section 31 used to lure the Reliant and the Enterprise into this system, they wouldn't have done it, if my crew wasn't here. They knew I would come for them."

She nodded, as she picked up his train of thought. "Stealing seventy-two cryopods from Section 31, which may or may not be able to report it, is one thing. Doing it in full view of two starships makes a world of a difference." She glanced around her. "Assuming that we can pull it off. I had a year-long course on Jonathan Archer's mission to the Xindi and this kind of Insectoid ships never stood a chance even against the Enterprise NX-01. There is no way we can make it past this century's Federation ships."

He typed at a control panel, pulling the Xindi vessel's specs on the screen. "This ship utilizes a method of propulsion that still is faster than your warp engines. We can outrun them and drop out of the subspace vortex the phase deflector pulse generates in orbit of Talos IV, where neither the Enterprise or the Reliant can follow us."

"The energy signature of nuclear batteries on 20th century cryogenic tubes is very faint. We'll still have to get close to Talos III to scan for it. In the time it will take the sensors to detect something so specific and then for the transporter to bring them aboard, the Reliant will have us in its revolutionary tractor beam."

His jaw set, something indomitable finding permanent residence in the hard lines of his face. "I am not leaving them there."

"I'm not suggesting you are." She waved her hand over the schematics of the deflector pulse. "Starfleet is still largely unfamiliar with the Xindi energy portal technology so if you blow up the Denobulan ship just as you open one to get away, the explosion will seem large enough to have destroyed the Insectoid one."

He drew his lower lip into his mouth, his expression growing thoughtful. "Too convenient of an accident."

"Not if they find me in an escape pod nearby and I tell them I killed you all in retaliation for my father's death."

"That might work with Starfleet, but what are you going to tell Cartwright? Because we both know he will find a way to come and ask you."

"The same," she replied unflappably. "I'll say I kidnapped you so you could lead me to your people and then I got rid of all of you in one blow."

Their gazes met and held. A brief flash of uncertainty crossed his face. "You could come with us."

She shook her head in denial. "Even if we managed to get away, I couldn't just disappear and leave my mother to spend the rest of her life wondering what happened to me."

His gaze did not stray from her for one second. His lips parted slightly, but no words slipped out. It was a solid strategy and he knew it. Probably even his best option at present. If both Starfleet and Section 31 thought he and his crew were dead, nobody would ever go searching for them. It was as good of a safety guarantee as they would ever get. And it was being handed to him on a silver platter. He didn't even have to ask, let alone lie, manipulate or barter to get it. She wondered why she was doing it herself. Being court-martialed for mass murder was light years away from being tried for deserting her post. But at least, she would be closing the cursed circle her father had opened when he had found the Botany Bay. In this century or any other, what did it matter who fired first and which side had endured most losses? Khan would never be allowed to stand trial and within Federation borders, he and his fellow augments were too much of both a danger and a temptation to have around.

His gaze softened and he crossed the short space separating them in a few, rapid strides only to grasp her by the upper-arms and pull her against him. He kissed her then like he had never kissed her before, with none of the careful gentleness of their earlier interlude, but with a violent passion that spoke of secret longing and desperation, of being found and of saying good-bye. Her legs felt cut at the knee and she sagged into the compact support of his body, kissing back and pouring her own conflicting and conflicted feelings for him in the frenzied meeting of lips and tongues and clashing teeth.

His hands slid up her arms and towards her throat, the fingers of the right one deftly and quickly pulling at the material of her blouse, revealing a patch of skin at the juncture of neck and shoulder. He broke the kiss and moved his mouth lower, puffs of hot, wet air caressing her as he did, until sharp pain erupted from somewhere right at the base of her neck. She cried out more in surprise than anything else, her hands anchoring themselves in his shirt. He had bitten her. She knew why he had done it. It was a memento, a parting gesture of sorts. He lifted his head, dark, wayward locks of hair falling over his forehead, her own blood painting his lips crimson. He looked wild, eyes like the Helix Nebula ablaze, a myriad of emotions swirling on his pale face, each one of them so intense that a human brain could not have hoped to withstand their assault.

She reached and brushed the hair from his eyes, pressing another kiss onto his mouth, not minding that she was tasting her own blood in the process. He responded in a more tempered manner, delicacy filtering back into his touch, as his hands petted her back through the cotton of her blouse. He held her like she was precious and his kiss was now gentle, savoring.

"I forgive you," she murmured, as they broke apart to catch their breaths.

He looked utterly wrecked by her words. She had never seen him like this before, so completely devastated, as though that simple statement had been a blow unlike any other. He seemed about to cry, his eyes wet, but no tears fell. His lips twisted, his lower one trembling. The bite mark where her neck and shoulder met was throbbing, a brand on her skin. His face, locked in torment, filled her vision. His knuckles stroked the side of her face, sending a shiver traveling down her spine. Carol let the moment drag for a while longer then snatched his wrist to stall him. Their time was up. It was over.

# # #

Though she had for all intents and purposes killed seventy-three people in the full view of the Starfleet ships, Jim Kirk had not put her into the brig, merely confined her to the quarters she had held as an officer on the Enterprise. The young captain also refused to believe her confession. Though his faith in her moved her, Carol could never tell him the truth. Nor could she use it to strike at the heart of Section 31. Perhaps the Federation needed them, perhaps it didn't. Maybe if she managed to dismantle Section 31, something else, something even worse, would sprout in its place. Or maybe just maybe human nature and that of their many alien allies was too flawed to subsist without some measure of corruption.

She sat cross-legged in the middle of her bed and rested her temple against the cold bulkhead. Outside the metallic boundaries of the ship the galaxy spun on its giant spiral lit by the stars. She wondered how far Khan had managed to get. She pressed her fingers into the imprint of his teeth at the juncture of neck and shoulder, stoking the ache. She would have to be careful to exercise her right to refuse a medical examination, until the wound would scar, something which would not happen, if a dermal regenerator interfered. Besides, it would raise too many questions. Her lips tingled with the phantom memory of his kisses.

TBC


	18. Chapter 18

A/N: we're almost at the end, my friends. :)

The shimmering veil of gold and brown of the subspace vortex the Xindi ship used to travel opened, letting them slip above Talos IV. Carol spared a fleeting thought to what might be going on the planet that was so grave, that Starfleet had declared it off limits, but she had no time to dwell on it now, as her fingers pounded the thick keys of an Insectoid control panel to manipulate the sensors. She grimaced, when her efforts proved futile.

"The sensors won't lock. The two planets are too far away. We need to get closer to Talos III."

"I can see that," he replied. "Moving into orbit."

She squinted, all but leaning over her view-screen. "Sensor detecting a starbase-like structure in the northern hemisphere. Scanning for the energy signature of nuclear batteries."

"The Starfleet ships have seen us. Estimated arrival in seven minutes."

The warning flew past her. A grin split up her face, as joy bubbled up in her chest. "I found them! All seventy-two," she said pointing to the flicking dots indicating the antiquated atomic batteries powering the cryotubes.

Khan looked at her with luminous eyes, a small smile flourishing on his lips, as happiness suffused his face. His fingers moved rapidly on the command console, activating the transporter to beam the pods on board and into the cargo bay. Carol spared the screen a quick glance to make certain nothing impeded the process.

"I have to go," she stated, once she was sure all was going well.

His eyes didn't stray from his own screen, as he grasped her upper left arm, his grip firm and secure. "Carol, they are not just my family. I have a duty to them. They followed me to outer space only to end up in an ice prison."

"I know," she said automatically, keenly aware of every second that ticked by. She wondered if he had ever entertained the illusion that it could end in any other way for the two of them. As far as she was concerned, parting with him while she was still alive was a considerable improvement over her initial expectations. However, something thorny sat within the left side of her chest. She gazed at his profile, alive with rare delight. Everything they had lived together came tumbling back to her, the contradiction between the man who had taken so much from her and the one she had come to know and who had given her a twisted sort of comfort standing in an even starker contrast. It occurred to her that this was the last time she would see him. She should be relieved to finally be rid of him, the peril he posed removed from Federation space, but instead she didn't know how she felt, her emotions hovering in a nebulous zone that was distant from hate and anger, but not approaching anything else that she could clearly discern, either.

He turned to look at her. "You have the subspace frequencies of this ship. I'll keep a channel open, should you ever decide to try and find us."

"That might not be safe," she countered. "Besides, I'll most likely be in containment indefinitely."

A shadow darkened his eyes. "I'll keep the channel open regardless," he said meaningfully.

Her heart leaped in her throat. "Fair winds on the forbidden seas and take care not to land on any barbarous coasts," she wished him, paraphrasing the book he loved so much, and leaned to press a quick kiss to his lips.

His eyes grew warm and soft and his hand ran down her arm and all the way to the tip of her fingers, which he squeezed briefly. "Farewell, Carol." Their hands parted. He gave her a tiny, sad smile. "I love you."

The thorn in her left side screwed its way into her heart. His confession uttered with simple honesty floored her, even if she could not return the sentiment. She just nodded, left with nothing else to say, then with one last half-hearted smile she sprinted off the bridge.

# # #

Carol watched Phlox's ship break apart from her escape pod with a good measure of guilt. It was unfair that they deprived the doctor of his vessel, after everything he had done for them, but under the circumstances it could not be helped. The opening energy portal swallowing the Xindi ship magnified the explosion, appearing to engulf it as well. The Enterprise and the Reliant were hovering nearby, silhouetted against the background of Talos III. Carol heaved an uneasy sigh. There was a heavy knot in the pit of her stomach. For some reason she didn't care to look into, the thought of never seeing Khan again stung. Her left leg was blessedly devoid of the ghost of pain haunting bone and muscle. There was another ache she felt in its stead, the one of the bite mark, with which Khan had left her.

"Good-bye, Captain Ahab," she murmured.

# # #

_A month earlier_

To any casual observer they were two professional acquaintances enjoying a late lunch in one of San Francisco's floating restaurants: a distinguished Starfleet officer and one of the few surviving graduates of the Vulcan Science Academy. Given the mid-afternoon hour, the place was mostly empty, but still they occupied a discreet table by one of the large window overlooking the Presidio below. They kept quiet, while the waiter put a roast beef before him and a plate of Kleetanta in front of his companion.

"There still has been no sign of Doctor Phlox's ship, Sir," Valeris said, once the waiter was out of earshot. "Are you certain you still don't wish you to speak to him about Doctor Marcus' escape? Perhaps she has made contact with him since."

Cartwright leaned back in his seat. "No, Phlox is a hero, the last surviving member of the crew of Enterprise NX-01. If he files a formal protest with Command and he will, if we pressure him, there will be a formal investigation, which might compromise our low profile."

"Very well," she confirmed. "May I ask a question, Sir?"

He nodded over a mouthful of his beef.

"Do you believe Carol Marcus to be alive still?"

The question took him aback. He tipped his fork on the edge of the plate. "No, I don't," he said regretfully. He had greatly respected the late Admiral Marcus, who had been a mentor of sorts to him, and it pained him to think that his beloved daughter had so carelessly thrown her life away. He had had great hopes of working with such a brilliant and highly-qualified officer. "He killed her the moment he got to his feet," he added. "And believe me, he found a way to. Her death is a terrible missed opportunity for us."

"Why would she rescue him then and expose herself to such a risk?"

Cartwright shook his head mournfully. "She was a distressed young woman, who had suffered a great loss. She wasn't thinking clearly."

"How would you like us to proceed then?" she asked in that infuriatingly even Vulcan tone of hers. But then Valeris might not show any regard to anyone, but she was one of the Section's most efficient operatives.

"Khan will come for his crew. Of that I'm sure."

"Should we not move them?"

"Too risky at this point. It might attract unwanted attention to the relocation of our destroyed London base to Talos III." He considered their options, while he cut into his roast. "No, let him  
come. We will be waiting and we won't be the only ones."

"Sir?" she inquired, her left eyebrow lifting to the improbable heights only a Vulcan could achieve.

"Starfleet is about to deploy a new generation of sensor drones along Federation borders. My position with the Tactical Analysis Division permits me access to them. This is why I asked you here today, as a matter of fact. I need you to design a virus to be keyed into the drones in the vicinity of the Talosian system so they'll transmit a false distress signal. Since this is a security breach at the highest level, a ship, maybe more, will be dispatched to investigate the problem."

"Given the severity of the penalty for approaching the forth planet, it is logical to assume that any such ship will not enter the system, hence assuring that our base on Talos III will not be discovered."

He nodded. "Exactly. The signal will also have to be self-replicating to assure ships will be dropping by for a while. If Khan tries to rescue his crew, he'll either be stopped. Even if he can get away, he'll put the fleet on general alert and there will be nowhere for him to hide from them. He can't pull the same stunt with the Klingons again, because according to our intelligence they've tripled their security since that incident in the Ketha province. He can't run to our allies, because they'll let us know, and he can't go the Romulans, because they are in the habit of shooting down anything that comes close to their borders. He'll be trapped."

"That is a sound plan," she said, a slight lilt to her voice. "I presume we have prepared an explanation for the presence of the cryopods on Talos III, should the question arise."

He shrugged. That one was easy. "Too dangerous to be preserved anywhere near Earth again," he replied coolly.

The ghost of a smile touched her lips. "Aye, Sir. I will start to work on the virus as soon as we finish our meal."

# # #

"Come in," Carol said, as soon as the door chimed.

Jim Kirk entered a second later. She gave him a wan smile. "You are the most gracious jailor anyone could ask for," she told him gesturing to the tea and the bowl of actual fresh fruit he had gotten her from somewhere. "Come, have a seat," she added indicating the chair across the desk from her.

He took a few wary steps inside her quarters, looking uncharacteristically shifty. "Carol... I was ordered to drop you off at Starbase 11. From there you are to be taken Earth to be court-martialed. Given the sensitive nature of what happened in the Talosian system, your trial will be classified. I requested permission to attend it and was granted. Doctor McCoy and Doctor M'Benga want to testify on your behalf, as soon as you wave your right to confidentiality." He came to sit opposite from her, his sky-blue eyes honest and alight with kindness and pity.

"Please, give them my thanks. And yes, I'll wave my right."

"Good." He nodded, blinking a few times. "Spock has been looking through the records of JAG lawyers. He can recommend you the best." He paused, as she conveyed her thanks again, his tired face taking on a pleading expression. His hand sneaked across the table to cover her left one. "Carol... I know you didn't do this... that you wouldn't, no matter what. Please, tell me what happened. Whatever it is, you can trust me."

She did, but she could not tell him the truth, despite the fact that she wanted to confide in him to such a degree, that there was a near physicality to the impulse. In fact, she almost blurted it all out, the unspoken words burning her tongue. But then Khan's thick baritone resounded in her mind, his parting love declaration vibrating against her eardrums. It felt unreal. Had he really said it? Had he done it in an attempt to ensure her keeping the augments' secret? That was actually easier to comprehend than the terrifying alternative that he had meant it. If he had, she had to wonder which one of them had fallen prey to Stockholm syndrome somewhere along the road of their unclear and uneven dynamic, as they had meandered through the Badlands, into Xindi space and finally to Talos III. A part of her genuinely hoped they had indeed shared a folie a deux; it made the thought of her completely wrecking her future and losing her freedom to protect Khan Noonien Singh and his family easier to bear.

Carol shifted her hand in Jim's grasp, knitting their fingers together. "What he did before he died wasn't who my father was," she said suddenly, surprised herself at how choked out she sounded. Kirk's eyes widened, a hint of sorrow darkening them. When he didn't speak, she went on.

"My parents split up when I was practically still a baby, but that had no impact on my relationship with him, even if we did live on different continents. We were always very close. I got along with him better than with my mother. I used to be able to confide in him about everything... the smallest, stupidest things. Growing up my friends envied out connection, going on and on about how much they wished they had such an understanding parent. He always supported me, he didn't even pressure me to join Starfleet and when I told him I was considering it, he was honest with me about the pros and cons of a career as an officer." She paused, swallowing past the lump in her throat, and Jim squeezed her hand harder. The loss of her father still hurt, the grief settled permanently within her like a brand on her soul. About that much she could be sincere. "Until I got wind of those bloody torpedoes and... well, you know the rest. I don't know what happened to him, Jim, how he got to the point where he fired on the Enterprise. And now we'll never have a chance to talk it out, because that... because Khan took him from me. I'm sorry, I know this isn't what you wanted to hear, but I couldn't let him live, I couldn't let him take someone else's family from them." She drew in a shaky breath, realizing that what she was telling him was a twisted version of the truth: she was defending someone's right to keep their family.

Kirk was looking at her with both affection and remorse in his gaze. "No, Carol, I am sorry," he said softly. "I'm sorry we couldn't do more for you, before it came down to this."

Tears prickled at her eyes, making them itchy. "It's alright," she uttered with a faint smile. "You did enough. You give me a new family... even if only for a while."

TBC


	19. Chapter 19

A/N: this story will not have a sequel. Please let me know what you think of it (and if possible, do not track me down to burn my house.:)

# # #

The stare contest had been going on for a few good minutes with neither of them backing down.

Carol was the first to break the tense silence. "I have been expecting you sooner, Commodore Cartwright."

"Are they really dead?" he asked in a measured voice.

"You think a shorter leash would have held him in? And if yes, for how long? A few months? A year? More? We both know he would have eventually gotten loose. My father made the mistake of underestimating that creature and he killed him... while I watched... with his bare hands. Do you know what the last words my Dad heard were?"

Cartwright sighed, studying her from the corners of his eyes, in which she thought she saw a hint of pity. "_You should have let me sleep_... . It was in Captain Kirk's incident report."

"He shouldn't have, though. He should have killed him, killed them all. I had to do it – for him... for you all." He was regarding her steadily. Carol schooled her face into a blank expression. "It's over now. They're gone."

Cartwright leaned back in his seat, resignation flickering over his features. "Are you comfortable, Doctor Marcus? Do you need anything?"

She shook her head no. "No," she said airily. "I'm finally at peace."

# # #

The system was small, just four planets orbiting a red dwarf. The first two were habitable, while the last ones were barren, frozen desserts marred by deep asteroids craters. But it was far away, way past the borders of the Tholian Assembly and into what the Federation deigned unexplored space. After careful consideration, he had decided to land on the first planet; it was a small one, about the size of Mars, but it was enough for seventy-three people. The geography was an uneven mass of tundras, rocky low-altitude mountains and hills interrupted by vast lakes and cold seas transversed by icicles. Sensors indicated no large animals, but still survival would be a challenge, given their very limited resources. However, they had each other and they were finally free. That had been over four months ago. In all this time he had kept a channel open within the Xindi ship's communications system, a channel he had no intention of ever closing. There was always a risk of the signal being intercepted, but it was a small one and it was even less likely anyone would ever pay any attention to a tiny, isolated star system on the outskirts of the Alpha Quadrant.

"And all I loved, I loved alone," Ling's voice came from behind him.

Khan smiled bitterly, not tearing his eyes from the vista of coral and dark green of the uneven plain spreading at his feet. "I never quite liked Poe," he commented. "Too melodramatic."

Ling slipped to his side with her casual grace, perching on the edge of the cliff he was currently standing on. "And yet your favorite authors are Melville, Shakespeare and Milton."

"Do not forget Dante!" he said mildly.

She scoffed, but when he looked at her, her grin was good-natured. "I wish I could... . May I ask her name?"

Khan glanced away again. "I suppose it's redundant to inquire how you've guessed."

"I haven't guessed. I know," she said with a certainty born out of a lifetime spent living practically in each other's pockets.

"Her name is Carol... Carol Marcus."

Ling winced. He had shared the details of what had happened between his being awoken by Alexander Marcus and the escape from Talos III but had kept his mentioning of Carol to a minimum, her memory, though dear, too painful to contemplate. If he did, he would have to accept that he might never see her again.

"I take it it's not a name coincidence," Ling said after a long pause, during which they stood together side by side in companionable silence.

"No, it is not," he said quietly, his memory summoning Carol's sweet face with impeccable accuracy.

"You weren't in the habit of denying yourself anything you truly wanted."

"That was in another life, Ling. Besides, I had you all to consider."

Ling rested her hand on his shoulder, squeezing slightly. "I can tell you one thing, though: you never do things the easy way."

# # #

The early evening air smelled softly of something that was very much like a mix of hyacinth and honey. A warm breeze caressed the valley, bringing the freshness of the nearby rivers into the city, which was surprisingly quiet given its large dimensions and the thriving activity that did not stop for the fall of night. Snow-capped mountains covered the horizon, profiled against rose-tinged skies. Brightly lit insects zigzagged across them, painting them with iridescent speckles of copper and azure. The view was both familial and alien, showcasing the extraterrestrial nature of the dynamic human colony on Archer IV.

"There you are," called a familiar voice from behind Carol, startling her from her contemplations. "I've been looking for you. Ready to try the famous Archerian slug wine? Real and non-replicated."

Carol stepped away from the railing bordering the small terrace of her mother's apartment on Archer IV and turned to her parent, noting again with great concern the deepening of the lines of her face and the many white hairs streaking her short golden bob. Her heart gave a mournful tug at the thought of how much pain and embarrassment she had caused her mother in the three years that had gone by since she had been expelled from Starfleet and found unfit to stand trial by reason of mental disease or defect and committed to a rehabilitation facility in Greenland back on Earth. She had recently been released on her mother's reconnaissance. The same mother who was watching her now with warm, worried eyes and an uneasy smile. She had come to the balcony holding two bulbous glasses filled with a thick light brown liquid. Carol took one from her with a mouthed thanks.

"You've received several subspace communiques, all from USS Enterprise."

Carol clinked her glass to her mother's. "I'll get to them later."

Her Mum's grin widened, some of her hesitance draining from her features. "I'm glad you've kept in contact with your friends."

Carol took a sip of her wine. The pulpy liquid stuck to her tongue and the roof of her mouth, swallowing it proving unpleasant, but it tasted good, a bit oaky and very pungent.

"You don't have to drink it, if you don't like it," her mother assured.

Carol shook her head, coughing a little. "It takes some getting used to," she confessed.

They were wary, still feeling their way around a relationship that had never been exactly easy. Through her sentencing and the subsequent years in the psychiatric facility, her mother had been quietly supportive, not asking any questions Carol wasn't ready to answer and relentlessly petitioning for her release in her care. For that alone Carol was immensely grateful.

"Mum," Carol began. "I'm sorry, so, so sorry. I can't imagine how hard these past three years had been for you, what kind of gossip, of judgment you've had to endure. The press called Dad a stain upon the reputation of Starfleet and then less than two years later I was expelled and declared mentally incompetent."

Her mother shook her head vehemently. "No! Carol, stop... please. I won't insult your intelligence by lying to you about how important my research at the Royal Academy was to me, but believe me when I say that nothing in the entire Universe comes before you. I know we've had our fair share of disagreements in the past and that we've quarreled all too often after you joined Starfleet, but the truth is that I was jealous of your and your father's closeness. I wished you'd come to me the same way you used to go to him with each and every one of your problems. I always felt like I was on the inside looking in, but you never stopped being my precious little girl and no matter what you were accused of or what people said, nothing has mattered to me more than the fact that you are alive and well."

A lump formed into Carol's throat blocking words of love that had never flown easily off her tongue. She gave her mother a one-armed hug, which was returned full-heartedly. She sniffled, burying her cheek into her Mum's shoulder, basking in the affection and the acceptance. They drank their wine in a comfortable silence for a while, after they had broke apart, standing at the edge of the terrace, surveying the busy street bellow.

"Mum, I never told you why I deserted and was almost court-martialed... ."

Her mother frowned slightly. "You don't have to. I trust you, Carol, much more than I ever did Starfleet. I know you didn't do anything wrong."

Carol drained the last of her wine. She was getting a little tipsy now, warmth spreading through her body, making it loose-limbed. Night, darker than it could ever be on Earth, had fallen around them, only the lights of the city dimming its black reign. Carol lifted her eyes to the sky above. The first stars were twinkling in the distance. Somewhere beyond them, far away, in a place she would probably never see, maybe just maybe a subspace channel aboard an antiquated Xindi ship remained open. She had thought about it every day for the past three years, turning her choices over and over in her mind, as time had wasted away slowly in that airy and uncannily colorful facility, to which she had been committed. Khan was haunting her. Three years and she still lacked a proper understanding of her feelings for the man who had killed her father. She still had nightmares of her Dad's death and pain still coursed through her left leg at times, but both occurrences had become rarer and rarer. At the junction of her neck and shoulder the imprint of Khan's teeth had scarred and the scar was starting to fade. Perhaps she was finally healing. She hoped she was, anyway, but couldn't be certain.

She was closer now to believing that Khan did in fact love her or had at last loved her at the time he had made his confession, but only because the notion made everything she had lost to protect him and his family easier to bear, lacing the impossibility of confiding in anyone with a certain measure of solace. She had just regained her liberty, but she did not feel free. Though none of her areas of expertise were available to her now, she could reorient towards a field still open to her, given her record of legally-enforced commitment, and begin a new life on Archer IV, far away from Starfleet and the fear of the watchful eye of Section 31. She should be relieved, but all she experienced was exhaustion. Sometimes she thought she could sleep for a thousand years and still not get any real rest.

"Mum," she said holding up her glass. "Do we have any more wine?"

~ the end ~


End file.
